Gone To The Store

NOTE: due to WebGL 2.0 issues, the game loads really poorly (and looks all weird) on macOS. It'll look like the page is crashing, but it works eventually, I swear. If it makes you feel any better, I'm using macOS for developing this, so I'm suffering right along with you. Doesn't work on Safari though, use Firefox or Chrome.

This is a short story about a dad going to the store to get milk, and the obstacles he encounters when trying to get home. It's basically a game jam game, but worse!

Development Process

I made this game in two weeks, essentially for the explicit purpose of learning the basics of Godot 4. I also made the art, recorded all the voice-over, wrote the story, learning each of those components in the process. The end result is this... thing. Calling it a game may be generous.

... I then ported the whole thing from godot-ink (using C#) to inkgd (using gdscript) so that I could export for web, which took a good couple hours? And man, can I say - way better documentation on the former than the latter.

... and it turned out I introduced a new bug or two during the porting process, so I proceeded to spend even more time hunting down the bugs.

According to my time tracker entries, in total, it has taken me:

• 3 hrs roughly spent on high-level design, outlining the story
• 19hrs (and counting!) on programming/learning Godot
• 6hrs on writing out the story in Ink
• 11hrs of art
• 2.5hrs recording and fiddling with audio
• ... and another 5 hours rebuilding in GDScript, and fixing export issues
• 2 hours of tuning menus to not be as ugly and misc bugfixing

Which... isn't that much time, all things considered? But not an insignificant amount of time altogether.

Tools Used

1. Audacity for audio recording/post-processing, splitting recording into many individual files
2. Godot 4.2 (initially 4.2 C#, then 4.2)
3. Inky (for editing Ink files)
4. Krita for my truly outstanding art
5. Toggl for entirely gratuitous time tracking