Big Boat - A Reflection

So this is how it begins?

I started messing with Godot about a week ago, mainly focused on trying to keep myself busy during a creative slump in other mediums. However, I've found that developing has been a lot of fun. I am not a good coder, and art is not a strong suit. This was my second project that an exe was generated for, with the only other project being the Godot 4 2d tutorial being the first.

The original idea of "Big Boat" was actually called "Broken Rudder Pro" and was originally gonna be a boating game where you only have the ability to turn in one direction, but I got too angry during the first play test. Before any code was done, the boat was built. This was by far the easiest part of the development of the app, and was a great place to start.  

Now this game/learning experience had two goals to start. First, I wanted to make the boat feel like a boat, or at least not stop on a dime. It's hard to feel fast without needing to have that speed go somewhere.  Second, I wanted to work with collisions, figure out how to make the boat interact with something. 

The initial code for movement was used from Godot's tutorial on Rotation + Movement (which took too long after attempting to use the the old tutorial in the docs... check your versions, kids) , but left a little to be desired: the boat had no feeling of momentum. This lead me through I think 4 or 5 different physics systems tutorials online before reaching out to my brother (Wyatt from Cakeneq Games - https://cakeneq.itch.io ) who spent about 3 hours working with me and walking me through the logic of how to add some inertia to the game before we tackled the final boss: collision.

Now, the theme of the game is boats, and where Wyatt and I are from, docs are frequently made from wood pallets, so what better than to put those as the obstacles. I never thought collision would be so tough to deal with, but between my inexperience and Wyatt mainly using Gamemaker Studio, we were fighting for it. The original idea was to make the pallets stop you dead in your tracks and make you turn around. However, we could not figure out how to keep objects from going through the wall. So, I got frustrated and thought of another way to verify that collision is happening. That's when I knew: Big Boat. So, with a couple lines of code (well, 4), the boat was now growing every time it collided. 

And with that, the two goals were accomplished. The boat now didn't stop on a dime, and it did something when it crashed.

Sitting here an hour or two after posting the game, I'm itching to keep going.  Though it's not 100% perfect, it felt good to create something in about 6 hours of total work time. Who knows what I'll learn next time?