(Not) Making the game (4)

I have to be really thankful for the fact that I chose to do the simpler idea, because I would have probably actually died if I had tried to do a big sound adventure game.

My plan was to work on the game during reading week, but my life said no. I will not be venting in a devlog, but I was so incredibly depressed and stressed and both my ASD and ADHD decided to make everything a thousand times harder, so I spent most of the time cuddling with my cat. He would not get off of me, I think he sensed that I needed his company.

I know that when you are working you cannot really stop to deal with everything, and I can usually do that without neglecting my responsibilities, but this time it was genuinely impossible for me to do so. I have still not fully recovered from what happened, but I am okay enough to pick up on what I left unfinished.

To stop staring at the same white screen all the time, I made a very quick background with little stars, and it gave me sort of… Travelling and journeying vibes. I reused the background for both the main menu and the end screen, because this time I had no reason at all to procrastinate by doing visuals. It is an audio game after all.

Except that I lied over there and I procrastinated by choosing the fonts and the colours.

I added lives and a score at the top, so you knew how well or how bad you were doing. Then, I made the audio icons not to procrastinate, but because I had to use texture buttons or else it would look very ugly. I used containers and boxes to align everything correctly, because doing it by hand started to become very tedious and it was still not looking good. I also added sound effects for when you get it right and when you get it wrong, I used the same ones I had for my last game! Thank you so much, Toby Fox. I will probably keep using the same two sound effects for the rest of the assignments, just because it will be funny to me.

I had a bug in which the game would crash after the end scene, and I had no idea what was causing that. I spent a good half an hour staring at my game and trying to figure out if the buttons were breaking it or if it was something else, until I realised that I was missing a “Return” and the game just kept running the same function over and over, which caused the problem. That is how I learnt to always check my code to avoid silly mistakes like that. (Silly mistakes will always happen).  I finished my game interface and I added the instructions right there, to avoid having to make a new screen with really simple instructions.

I tested the audio with a French song and a conversation, and when it finally worked and you could play and stop the audio, and the buttons were disabled until the question changed, I decided to quickly do the end screen and the main menu. They are definitely not my best work, graphic design-wise, but they serve their purpose. I then finally thought that I should change the order of the questions, and I panicked for about ten seconds, which was the time it took me to look up how to randomise arrays in godot. The shuffle function saved me from a programmer crisis.

After that, I could finally start looking for my audios and putting them in the game. Yay! It was very fun to pick and choose different scenes from cartoons and songs that I like (I watched a lot of My Little Pony and Miraculous Ladybug in different languages), this was my favourite part of making the game. (Because it was literally the last thing I had to do to finish it). I just did ten questions, because I did not have a lot of time, but I actually might add more questions later just because I want to send the game to my friends and see how far they go. For now, I chose some of the most known languages in the world.