
Show HN: The Jumping Jouster, a Godot game I made in my spare time - nrjames
https://clay.itch.io/the-jumping-jouster
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nrjames
I made The Jumping Jouster over a few months, in my spare time. The browser
version requires Chrome. I'm happy to answer any questions about working with
Godot, the rewards and/or challenges of making the game, the effectiveness of
conscripting my children to be Quality Assurance, etc. It was a lot of fun to
make!

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yepthatsreality
Fun little game. I'm also looking to start a side project in Godot.

What was the most time consuming piece of this game? Art? Physics?

What did Godot make easy-peasy?

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nrjames
The horse animations took a long time, but also were a lot of fun to work on.
I thought I was going to need to use a tool like Spine to create the
animations, but the built-in AnimationPlayer node in Godot is really powerful,
so I ended up using that for everything. For art, I have an iPad and a Mac, so
I used Affinity Designer. I would draw on the iPad, save to iCloud, then load
it up on the Mac for tweaking and export. GDScript is a breeze to use and the
documentation is pretty good, so I rarely struggled to figure out how to do
anything in code.

Ultimately, the most time-consuming part was probably building some systems
that I never ended up using in the game. It wasn't "scope creep," per se...
more that I never had determined scope to begin with. For example, in the
game, there's only grass, but I actually created all of the art and a track
generation system for multiple different ecosystems, only to realize that I
had fallen down the Procgen rabbit hole and didn't need it for the gameplay.

The game itself actually doesn't use a physics engine. I use a few Vectors
here and there to calculate acceleration. I've done some small projects that
use physics, however, and it's very easy to incorporate them with Godot.

The export to HTML5 in Godot 3.1 is not great. I couldn't get it working with
GLES2 (for reasons unknown to me) so I had to switch to GLES3, which largely
limits to Chrome for in-browser play. It never was a goal to make it playable
on the web. If I were to start over again, I'd include a loading screen so
that the sound wouldn't get choppy at the start of the game and I would do a
lot more incremental testing of the web exporting to make sure it worked well.

I use Unity at work. Godot is an absolute pleasure to use compared to Unity.
It lacks bloat, has a great user community, it easy to get started with, and
uses a scene hierarchy model that, to me, is more intuitive.

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nrjames
Looks like a Godot point release today fixed a lot of GLES2 issues, so I’ll
see if I can get that working soon.
[https://godotengine.org/article/maintenance-release-
godot-3-...](https://godotengine.org/article/maintenance-release-godot-3-1-2)

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Waterluvian
I'm thinking of making a game in my spare time for fun with Godot. Did you
enjoy using Godot?

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nrjames
I have a blast with Godot. It lets me really focus on making the game instead
of navigating through a bunch of stuff I don't understand. The Discord and
various other Godot communities are great, too. As open source software, there
are some known issues that simply end up at the back of the priority queue for
remediation, but in general, anything important is patched quickly. Plus, if
you're so inclined, you can help patch the core product. I really like working
with it and I try to pitch in where I can with the docs, etc.

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nrjames
In case anybody comes across this in the future... I added this to the Mac App
Store: [https://apps.apple.com/us/app/the-jumping-
jouster/id14895181...](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/the-jumping-
jouster/id1489518199?mt=12)

