Beadel the Carpenter Post-Mortem

Here is my post-mortem for Beadel the Carpenter. I learned a lot and plan on doing more game jams in the future.

Contents

1. Intro
2. What Went Well
3. What Didn't Go Well
4. What I will do Next Time
5. Details
   1. Music
   2. Sounds
   3. Animation
   4. Publishing

Introduction

Beadel the Carpenter (BtC) is my first completed game jam. I had started several others, but never got anywhere close to finishing them. The games were too large for the time allowed and there were too many unknowns that I had never tackled before the jam.

Before going into this jam, I had about 2 months of daily game dev experience in Godot. I completed many tutorials and built 3 prototypes of various games in order to understand the system and game dev better.

I wanted to focus on getting a game submitted for the jam, but I also wanted to stretch my skills. I had included music and sound into my earlier prototypes, but never created my own audio from scratch.

Timewise, I found out about the jam on Wednesday afternoon. I worked on the game in the evenings until Friday at 5 PM, when I submitted it.

What Went Well

I think there are several things that went well. I liked the animation and sound design. I really liked the interactive main menu / tutorial.

This is my third use of fragment shaders I coded myself. I'm still learning, but it's pretty amazing the things you can do with shaders. For this one, the wood uses a basic mask shader to "chew" out the wood.

For the main menu / tutorial, I was struggling with how to have a tutorial without breaking the flow of the game, doing a complex series of dialogues, or just telling the player in a long block. After thinking it through, it came to me to do an interactive menu. Basically, if they can navigate the menu, they know the buttons to push for the game.

What Didn't Go Well

4 hours before I was to submit the game, I realized that I didn't have an end game. I started freaking out, because that meant the build-up of the player due to level progression and reporting money earned would fall flat. I decided to have the payoff be tied to the narrative. In the end, I felt the most unhappy with the end scene.

The narrative I had for the game also wasn't able to be shown. I had planned for Beadel to be the person who owned the carpenter's shop and the beetle to be unnamed, but I couldn't put enough narrative in for players to separate the two. So, the beetle is now named Beadel as well.

What I will do Next Time

Next time, I think I will continue to do some iterative game ideation before I commit to one idea. For this one, I came up with 6 ideas before settling on my last one, which was this.

I think I may try some time management techniques. For this one, there were stretches where I went too long and my brain fuzzed out. I've used the Pomodoro method in the past and it works well if you can stick to it.

I'm not sure what to do for the narrative issue. I need to figure out how to do dialogue and cutscenes in Godot.

I'm also going to make sure I have my overall game loop firmly in mind. For this game, the level loop was tight, but the fact that I forgot the overall game loop until the end means I didn't play through the game in my head before I started working on it.

I'm also going to try and keep a better devlog, as it makes the process more orderly and allows me to learn more from my jams.

Details

Here are some more details about the process. You can also see all the code and assets on Github at https://github.com/matthewpaul-us/godot-beadel_the_carpenter.

Music

The music was one thing that almost finished me. I had watched several videos on Bosca Ceoil and some basic music theory, but this was my first composition. I wanted something whimsical to fit the lighthearted art style and the whimsy of a beetle carpenter. Because the game would only have 1 track, I wanted to make sure that it repeating wouldn't annoy too many people. To help with this, I listened to it back to back for a bit.

Sounds

The sounds were recorded by me using a Blue Snowball mic and mixed using Audacity. There are two sounds in the game, walking and eating.

For walking, I used oats dropped on a plastic plate. It gave it a clicky feel that reminds me of bugs by adding a High-Pass filter. I didn't want to creep people out, so I made sure it was quiet in the game.

Eating involved me biting stale pretzel sticks and chewing. This one was hard to record because I had to be close to the mic, but it started picking up my breathing noises. For audio, no one wants to listen to someone else eat, so I made sure to cutify the sound by pitching it up. I picked a long enough section so that it wouldn't sound repetitive and overlaid the pretzel bites to help remind the player that this beetle is chomping through wood.

Animation

I had attempted animation in a game once before in Godot, but it failed miserably due to my project structure. I learned from that failure several valuable lessons, such as making sure you animation the correct nodes so that when parented, it will remain in local space rather than warping to the origin of the game level.

The two animations again are walking and eating. For walking, I looked up some websites about bugs walking to find out they use a double tripod walk. I basically replicated that on the beetle. Some small tweaks I did to make it feel more impactful was to subtly shift his body side-to-side to help the movement of the legs feel organic. I also made sure to move them slightly to help him look like he's reaching more.

Publishing

Publishing a game caught me by surprise. Because I had never released a game before, I didn't know all the work that goes into publishing even a basic game such as BtC.

For Itch.io, you need a description, game card, screenshots, uploads, genre, tags, install info. I had never recorded gameplay before so I had to crash course in OBS Studio.