Official Release!

Hello again!

I am excited to announce the release of our little game Butterfloop. It is a little bit funny to actually be excited to release something like this...a little flappy bird clone that most people won't see, and the ones who do see it probably won't be able to finish it (turns out not everyone is as patient as me to make it through this game lol) In theory you can finish this game in about 3 minutes, but that requires more focus than I expected, and it is a bit punishing to force the player to restart the entire game when you die but hey...that is what I went for. 

I can't go on without thanking my wife Jane (Creachadoir) for her help with the art which I think is amazing and the best part about the game. I also want to thank Bread for providing the music as well which fits the tone well and is fun to listen to while playing. A final thanks to Detiner for letting me vent my frustrations about programming and helping me debug things despite not being a programmer himself.

Learning how to game dev is a ton of fun and has lots of exciting moments, but it also comes with lots of frustration and stress. I'll try to go over as much as possible in this post. To start, this was my 2nd attempt getting into game dev. I started a couple years ago after seeing a Jason Weimann video on how to make an Angry Birds clone. It was my first taste of game dev and it was very fun...until it wasn't. I followed his tutorial and loved every minute of it, so right after jumped in to trying to make my own games. I was instantly taught that there is so much more to this than I thought, and didn't have the mental fortitude to stick out the tough times. I gave up on it for a year or so. This year I came back to it and tried a different tactic. I have heard all about 'tutorial hell' but I decided to embrace it a little. I followed tutorials by Zigurous on YouTube including his Flappy Bird tutorial as well as several others. I wanted to just get a taste of what it was like to build a bunch of different games. I found Tetris to be the most difficult, Pong and Flappy Bird to be the most possible for ME to recreate, and Asteroids and Centipede somewhere in the middle. 

During the Centipede tutorial I had a moment where I thought, actually screw this I am ready to just make my own iteration of a game and figured my best chance was with a Flappy Bird clone. It is a very simple game to make on its own, but also pretty easy to add a few ideas on top of it just to learn some skills that the base game wouldn't teach me. New levels, an options screen, pause menu and things like that. So I jumped into it, this time armed with some help I did not have previously.

I used chatGPT to help me code this game. Without it, I would be no where close to done by now. However, it wasn't as simple as it seemed it would be from the start. At first it was very easy and fun. "Hey chatGPT, can you show me how to make the bird flap? Can you show me how to transition between scenes? Can you explain what this error means?" etc. But as I got farther into the project and asked it more and more questions, I started to realize that this would be more difficult. A perfect example is the pause menu. It worked fine on level 1. But on level 2 and 3 it would pop up when the player pressed escape but then none of the buttons would work. I asked chatGPT the same questions, reworded about a hundred different ways and just could not figure out why it wouldn't work! Eventually I figured I would try google instead and finally I learned about Event Systems. My 2nd and 3rd levels didn't have Event Systems and chatGPT didn't know that. I also didn't know that and I had no clue what they even did. This is a great example of the struggles of learning game dev. Knowing what you don't know...its hard to describe but it is a big part of what makes game dev so difficult. I had a similar issue learning how to make the music turn off when the player dies. No matter how I worded it to chatGPT, I couldn't get the proper answer until a random YouTube video used specific syntax to reference a script that I had never seen before, and it actually worked when I tried it! I lost several sessions of time trying to solve both of those issues which caused a lot of doubt and stress. Keep in mind I have a full time job at the same time (as I am sure most beginner game devs do!) but not making any progress on those sessions means a few days of no progress and constant thinking about how to solve these issues. Its stressful! But the feeling when things finally click in is almost unbeatable. When the pause menu worked on level 2 I was elated and it all felt worth it. Plus I learned important lessons for future games! All of that said, I will continue to lean on chatGPT here and there but I learned that it won't be the only resource required.

Of course the game is not perfect which makes it hard for me to say its 'finished'. I am well aware that the hit box is not great, so as a last minute change we tried to make the levels a little easier in response to that. The level transitions are not perfect. Those of you with keen ears and/or previous knowledge of the logarithmic volume idea will notice that I have not implemented that despite having it in place originally. I was running out of time (self imposed deadline of course) and I was also just getting sick of the game at this point. I had to make sure it was in a playable state and just get it out there, allowing me to work on new game ideas and get better at those things in future games. During the process of making this game my brain was just filled with ideas on all other sorts of games I would like to make to build my toolset. 

So with that in mind, we are taking a very short break to read some books and do some more tutorials. We plan to jump into 'production' of our next game on 06/01/2023 for our first attempt at a classical JRPG. Nothing too crazy, a small party of characters fighting random battles with some small story elements, NPCs, shops and a levelling system. These all seem like very important things to learn which is why it is our next project. We are also allowing ourselves 3 full months for this one, hoping that is enough time to put together something basic, but working and playable. 

If you made it this far, thank you! If you have any interest in following along our journey then you can follow me here on itch. I want to practice a more 'official' approach to the next project so I will try to keep an updated dev log weekly. I hope you gave Butterfloop a try, and of course I am happy to receive any kind of feedback at all. Thanks again!