0.1 Release: What I learned during this jam...

The #1 thing that this game taught me is just how hard it can be to make a 3D environment. I’m used to creating architecture in BSP workflows, so to create something that felt natural and pleasing, while also having a collision mesh for the player was really something else.

This time I downloaded a bunch of attributable or CC0 assets to use in my project, imported it into Godot, and placed everything in Godot. Next time I’m thinking I’ll want to do this in Blender instead, where I have way more control over splines, mesh deformation, and non-destructive workflows.

I learned that you can take a .blend file with a bunch of surface-level objects, export it as a .glb, load it as a scene in Godot, and use Scene -> Convert -> MeshLibrary to make GridMaps really quickly? I did this for the fences in my game.

Although I didn’t really use much of the mesh library at all, it really helped to just make it way easier to place these objects. Although it’s on a grid, I’m definitely doing this again for stuff like stones and trees if I can help it, all prepared in Blender. My next step would be to figure out if I can automate collisionshape placement with these meshes too, and make it infinitely easier to just place stuff in the world, primarily using Godot.

Scaling, transforming, and rotating meshes en-masse to create fake mountains just in Godot was a lot of effort, and getting accurate collision shapes without bloating the physics engine was another step that I didn’t bother to fight head-on.

Originally I started this game out of a desire to make something artsy and strange. I made a weird player controller that just uses a raycast and a small, hovering collision shape. I created my own alternate planting algorhythm for MultiMeshInstance and looked into Poisson Disc sampling. Ultimately, what this game is right now is a stripped down version of a lot of experimenting that I’ve done in the past two months.

The “keep it simple” theme helped me let go a bit and just let imperfect things be imperfect things in this game. Not all models have collision, but hopefully by making most of them collidable nobody will notice. :)