It was mainly just a little clean up today, (along with a name change, I thought Treasure Diver was more suitable) setting up sliders to adjust the music and sound effects volume, and then it was time to upload the game to itch.io, and this is where todays problems began.
For some rason one of my enemy scripts was giving a not found error, turns out I had the capitalization wrong on the file name in the gdscript, so with that sorted out everything was now working as it should, I did go back in and play around with the difficulty curve, but I think it might still need some further refining, as soon as you hit 10 chests collected the game goes from easy to insanely difficult with nothing really in between.
Graphics, Graphics, Graphics.
I really underestimated how much work doing all the graphics for the itch page would be, it ended up taking me somewhere in the region of 5 hours to get them all done but I think the end result was worth it, and I can honestly say I am very happy with how the page looks.
Link Tracking
Before I can start trying to push traffic to the game I need to set up some form of link tracking so I can see for future games where it is worth spending time to post about the game. When it comes to marketing being able to track where traffic is coming from to reach what you are advertising is invaluable information.
The Experience
Overall it was a nice fun little project, there’s nothing crazy difficult going on since it’s just slightly pushing the foundations which is a pattern that these games will take, each one will push things just a little further, doing this ensures a strong understanding of the basics which makes introducing new things a lot easier and also opens up new possibilities in future games / levels. For anyone reading this that wants to make a game. Don’t waste your money on courses, or your time on YouTube tutorials. Use the official documentation, if there is a concept you are unsure of or if you need help with solving a problem chat gpt will help you gain the insight you need to be able to solve the issue without just giving you the code (the code it generates is for GoDot 3 not 4 so is mostly unusable, but having to adapt it into version 4 will ensure you understand what the code is doing). For the next game I am undecided at the moment if I want to go for another 2d game or try 3d, but I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.
The Remaining Misc
I had planned on doing a YouTube dev log series to go along with this, I honestly wasn’t expecting to finish up with it so quickly, so I guess rather than dev log updates it will now just be an overview of the experience of building a game.
I do have a bunch of other tracks for the background music I want to add and the OST will then be added to YouTube and spottily too.
I think thats the main bulk of the odds and ends left for me to clean up, if this was a game that I was expecting / trying to make generate revenue then I would now be looking into creating ad banners and finding ad networks with suitable placements to run a marketing campaign, but for a free game like this I don’t think that makes sense, but I’ll cover it when we get to a game where it makes sense to run a paid add campaign.