First Post

Last month there was a post on Metafilter about the Godot Engine, and approximately five minutes into working my way through the first tutorial, I started getting extremely excited by it. Finally, a full-featured games engine that I think I can actually get along with, which also lets you write for HTML5, Linux, WinPC, Mac, Android and iOS all at once. I am hooked.

I've been tinkering around with games libraries for a long time, but one way or another never quite had the time or all-round coding chops to build anything hugely much with any of them. I managed a couple of tiny JavaScript games, had a lot of fun with PuzzleScript when it first came out, and also Twine, but none of these quite scratched the itch for me. I've stared balefully at Unity once or twice, but it never clicked.

Enter Godot, and hence this game, Zap T.C.A.S.

As a retro arcade space shooter, it's never going to win any award for originality, but it's not supposed to: the idea is much more for me to build a complete game using the engine and learn how it works. Solving all the problems involved in implementing aliens and bullets (collision detection!), explosions (shaders and particles!) and the general UI (boring stuff you still have to get right!) should leave me in a place where I could start thinking about what kind of game I might actually want to make without simultaneously have to teach myself the basics of Yet Another Engine Or Something.

So here we are. Basic gameplay, of a sort, is implemented, there is a UI in which you can adjust the SFX volume, and there's a quit button I really need to disable in the HTML5 version. Downloadable versions to follow in due course, once it's all fleshed out a little more.

I have plans.

There will be kittens.