I’ve always had a strong interest in games, and I’ve found that they’re one of the best ways to learn Object-Oriented Programming concepts. With that in mind, I joined a Game Jam (a game development competition) where I had one month to develop a game from scratch.
The game I created is a 2D, top-down shooter featuring waves of enemies.
You can either clone the repository and run the game using the Godot Engine (open source) or download on the site: https://papillonstudios.itch.io/moonlight
Challenge myself to build a complete game while balancing my personal schedule and my full-time job as a software developer, while gaining more hands-on development experience.
I usually use Unity for game development, but for this project I decided to try Godot. The experience was surprisingly positive, Godot is much simpler and lighter compared to Unity, especially for 2D games. To create the art I used Pixelorama(Open Source), easy and lightweight pixel art multitool.
However, there are some limitations when using C#. For example, I wanted to export the game to WebGL so I could host it on my GitHub site, but Godot only supports WebGL exports when using its own language (GDScript) instead of C#. Despite this, my overall experience with Godot was great, particularly for 2D development.
As for the final result, the game is average. It has some bugs and isn’t very polished, since I created most of the art from scratch while also writing all the code. In total, I spent around 20 hours on the project, so I’m satisfied with what I achieved. I’m confident that I’ll be able to reuse parts of the code in future games.