Unit 763

A Side-Scrolling Shoot-em-up for the New Year New Skills Game Jam! Created by a team of two over the course of a week in the Godot Engine. Fight man-eating plants and bring the planetary outpost back online!

Gameplay Demo Video

GitHub Repository

Controls

• A and D to Move Left and Right or Swing on Vines
• SPACE to Jump
• W and S to Climb Up and Down Vines
• Left Click/Hold to Shoot

Lessons Learned

Planning is very important!

It seems obvious, but for this jam, we likely should have landed on a unified design earlier than we did and actually made a proper design doc. We're both very happy with how it turned out, but it would have saved us some stress. In the past, we've tended to over-plan. This time we under-planned.

Define your roles!

It's great for everyone to do a little of everything in a team, but you run the risk of no single part of the game getting enough attention. We had both wanted to try and do both art and gameplay programming, which was a difficult balance to strike. We should have broken down each of those two disciplines further, then each taken on smaller parts of each.

Godot is great, but it doesn't play nicely with version control.

Due to a relative lack of Godot community discourse on Git best practices as well as the engine being targeted more towards hobbyists than professional devs, Git got very messy, even though we were branching properly and working in separate scenes. Unity, for example, handles this much better.

Feedback

If you have any suggestions or ideas, issues to report, please do so in the Comments section below! We're always looking to improve on our projects