Moonlight Vale

Just a short one today. I haven’t gotten too much done since the last devblog, I had an incident with my manager at work and really felt like I wasn’t able to spend time on my game this week. 

What I managed to implement is a scene switcher, i.e., traveling between instances. This was a huge win as I did it with minimal guidance!! 

Next on the agenda is getting a door to serve as the trigger for the scene switching. Shouldn’t be too difficult with all the components I have already. 

Beyond that, I’m trying to sit down with friends and brainstorm some additional mechanics and storyline for Moonlight Vale. Once the door trigger is implemented and some other creatures and things are decided on, I’ll be working on fleshing out the first level of the game. Exciting! 

Welcome to the first DevBlog for indie game in development--Moonlight Vale!

Buckle up, because I've worked on a lot already before posting this... Oops.

The road so far:

*As a sidenote, "implemented" means applicable audio, collision, etc. have been tested and are working with associated thing

- A Trello board to keep track of everything, which I'll probably link at a later date and it's more polished

- Followed HeartBeast's 2D RPG Godot series on YouTube (cannot recommend this enough)!

- Main character fully animated and implemented

- 1st enemy (bat) fully animated and implemented

- Grass and path tilemap implemented

- Bush implemented

- Grass fully animated and implemented

- Some audio assets from HeartBeast used to add life, probably temporary

- Subscribed to a bunch of Godot channels on YouTube because knowledge is infinite

- Downloaded free assets from itch.io (to use temporarily or permanently, not sure yet)

- Purchased Aseprite for my own pixel art

- Designed the Health/Stamina bars

- 1st main character design iteration

Here's what's in progress:

- Learning Godot -> Ongoing - Designing and scripting the Menu UI - Implementing the Health/Stamina bars, had some trouble with the Godot GUI tutorial so trying again from scratch - Fleshing out "level 1" AKA the Homebase/Spawn level with HeartBeast assets + itch.io assets - Integrating all downloaded itch.io assets into appropriate project folders

And a preview of what's to come:

- Town & world design - Hitpoints over enemies - Toolbar design - Start screen design - New character animations for different activities - XP bars - Possible Twitter account for game updates?

I most likely forgot a bunch of stuff, my mind is kind of on overload from all the work! Hoping to make some more progress today, and these DevBlogs will be as often as I can make them. I do have a nearly full-time job during the week which takes precedence. 😊

Hey there! The name is Bree, and welcome to the Moonlight Vale developer blog.

I started this journey just a short week ago, in efforts to squash the boredom of two weeks off from work, plus that nasty creep of seasonal depression...

Good news--it worked! At this point in time, I can't recall a time when I was so inspired to achieve something. It's a wonderful feeling.

I'm currently a (nearly) full-time intern with a lot of off time, so I'm thinking worst-case scenario from developing this game is... I learn a bunch of stuff and I have something to show in a portfolio? Plus, GDScript is similar enough to Python that the knowledge sort of transfers.

I did a lot of Googling and subreddit searching before I decided to work with the Godot gaming engine. It's a tough learning curve for sure, and you'll have to do some digging through the docs, through YouTube, and the general web for solutions, but it's an incredibly powerful tool for game dev.

Anyway. Gonna hop off this intro train before I find myself down a rabbit hole and have suddenly typed eight paragraphs.

Thanks for reading folks!