The First 12 Hours!

Hey! This covers the first 24 hours of development I had with the project. This is a passion project taking a ton of things I love and giving them an explorative game to write a massive fan love letter!

Project Mana is a super early in development project about living in a world where you'll create your own magic! And this is a mechanic that still gives me a headache because how do you create systems for magic creation while making the magic feel well magical? And the answer is still in development! I have a ton of ideas that will take a ton of time to realize which is why we're starting with this build and overall these updates will serve to show publishers what the game and myself are all about! So hopefully one day I can get it published and really upgrade it to the next level!

Origins!
This game in fact came from another project I was working on which was a Kingdom-like with more depth to the city building. This is a project I played with for roughly a month and got some art for but ultimately I was more fascinated about the world and magic in it. Which wasn't at all the main focus of the game.

So, after some time I realized there was no vision for this project. It was a wish to create a Kingdom-Like with some deeper settlement management features. And that just wasn't inspiring.
I've been thinking of a game where you create your own magic since before I could program. It's honestly one of those dreamy ideas you have that gets you into game development but you never do. But now I'm deadset on creating this awesome mechanic and building a cool and wild world around it!

The First Goal
I had set goals on Trello for myself while I streamed every inch of creating this new game. And I decided to keep using the art style because I spent some time with an artist to nail it down and they're great, the art is great; it'd be a shame to put it waste.

Within 30 or so minutes I had this rough concept of what the game would be worked out. Godot has always been hit or miss with the 2D-HD style and I've really wanted to make a game in that style with Godot for some years now. But this time I got it working nicely and I was hyped to get this going!

The player could kinda move around this small area and that was it. But not for long! By the end of a 3-4 hour mark of the original work time on it I had animations going, a walk-sprint system, jumping, I even sat on stream and built a little starting town to mess around in that was based on Pallet Town from Pokemon Leaf Green. Of course as it gets developed it'll change more from that original inspiration. But Leaf Green was my very first Pokemon game and the starting gave me such a strong feeling of adventure; and I want everyone to feel that stepping into this town as well.

There's a lot of copy and paste in the world and I don't want any of the tribute I'll be paying to some of my favorite titles to be taken as plagiarism.

But with some hard work, art from my previous project; and a couple asset creators I had this nice little area built out pretty quick! I'll likely reach out to the tileset artist to get more for the game because I love the style. Plus I'll need to 3D model a lot of stuff and texture it with pixel art. Heavily inspired by Octopath Traveler and Triangle Strategy; and the character art is actually inspired heavily by Final Fantasy Tactics! Played that a kid a TON on my gameboy and eventually my DS.

When I came back after a small nap I got right back to it! I made a world clock system that not only tracks the time but also tracks the date of each month and can execute events on days! On top of that events are super easy to add to each month and modifying these months takes no coding. Godot is the engine of my choice every time because IT GETS ME! How I work in Godot only works in Godot and it meshes with my though process so well. That may make me a lesser programmer; but I love the process.

I also added in crawling, evading (rolling), and a backstep feature as well for when you're not moving and press the evade button. That way you get more utility out of it. I'm massive into movement and will likely even add wall running and stuff in just because I'm massive into movement. Plus what pixel RPG even in 3D has parkour movement? Most of the time you'll be lucky to jump. I also want movement magic to have a place in this world as well. I'm talking making sure you can create air dashes, double/triple/quadra jumps, teleportation; I want it all!

I also modeled new houses on stream, didn't texture them yet but the concept is there!

I also made the buildings in the game all to scale and all enterable. Every building you see you will be able to enter, the game won't be at a massive scale so it won't be as hard to do. I added some polish too, you slow down when you enter and can only walk inside buildings. There's also a subtle camera zoom change as well! Eventually they'll have doors to make this make more sense but for now we'll have to use our imagination!

This wrapped up my first initial goal and now that I'm looking at it I feel like I should've added more stuff to the list. But I remind myself the best work comes with a short list of things I need and then as I work on it more will come. Like evading, backstepping, crawling; and some other stuff wasn't even on the list originally. But it felt right to add into the game.

Goal Number Two!
So this 24 hours of work time isn't all in one day to be upfront now; I'm streaming it all so I just am counting the time I'm streaming to determine the 24 hour mark of work.

I woke up after 5ish hours of sleep, mixed up some GFuel; and got to working on the next set of goals I had. The list wasn't much just add in sounds for the most part.
So, I took the time to get some fun sounds and a music track and plopped them into the game. Almost everything has positional audio because I want the audio to be immersive to some degree and feel good.

I also made a footstep player that detects what you're walking/running on and produces footsteps to match! Very cool little code that makes a big impact. The building also now has an open and close door sound when you enter and leave for a nice touch. And now when you jump into the water you hear a plunge sound and you get transported to your last safe stepping point. The safe step code is really cool too!

But that's all I had for the list....so onto the next goal list!

Three Times The Work!
Here we are on the 3rd set of goals! In under 12 hours too! Wild.
This was the original list of goals I had set:

So I already have an inventory system I can plug in, and the other item types wouldn't be hard to get ready either. So, why push it back if most of it is already set? And the asset Godot Sky shouldn't be hard to implement either.

RPG stuff man, for any of those consumables, tools, weapons, and so on to be tested I need character stats and systems! There's gonna be weight limits on your inventory, gear will have stat requirements too, there'll be skills you'll have to unlock via gameplay; oh yeah I'm bringing in all the RPG mechanics into this one.

Back when Oblivion was the newest and boldest TES I LOVED IT! It was my first RPG I got to play myself. I played FF7, 8, 10; and 10-2 on my dad's saves for sure. But this one I was allowed to have my own save. And I loved that to grow you had to actually use the attributes you wanted to raise. Then I was heart broken in middle school when Skyrim abandoned that method of levelling up.
I've vowed to incorporate that style into my games since then.

There won't be levels at all in this game. Just you raising your stats which will make your character stronger. There'll also be an energy meter and I'll add in things like doing push-up and basic exercises down the road. They're not hard things to implement so why not?  For right now though I'm aiming at just making these systems work and not feel bad. I want players to need to balance out their days on what they do but I also don't want them to run out of energy after running to a dungeon. That would suck. So let's get into what I actually did!

I implemented the stat system for all characters which included unlocking skills once the required stats were high enough; and they level up by using associated actions like running and jumping. Now I got flamed by someone for about the entire 2.5 hours I streamed because of how I handled it.
So, thank you random viewer for trying to roast my coding skills for 2 hours; I'd say it dented my ego but I'm aware I'm not a good technical programmer. Hopefully he wishlists in a couple years.

Anyways this system was pretty sweet and I did implement double jumping as a test and added a little banner when you unlock a skill! No idea if it'll stick but for now it's pretty alright.

You can also see I added the energy system and it does work! You can get knocked out from running out and it recovers when you sleep as well as drained by literally all your actions! But I'll make sure it doesn't ever severely limit what you can do; after all the game has no set end-time so you got all the time in the world.
And yes I did make a sleep mechanic, and made a bed thanks to Silver Key for their bed model.

And that's the end of the first 12 hours!