Necromancer Godot Wild Jam Devlog

The Idea

The initial idea for this game was to be a necromancer, transforming people using your magic orb. You could then go to them and rip out their soul to use as a magical boost or currency. You could have up to five souls orbiting around your orb, and you could merge them together to form stronger souls. Every time you reach a certain soul value threshold the soul would change colour. I came up with this to satisfy all three wild cards: You transmutate people, get their soul as currency, and they orbited around the orb which would eliminate the need for UI.

The execution

Since I wasn't going to join at first, I started the game on day 2 or so. I made the player animations, the orb, the souls, and the sparks to signify health. I got the player to move around and the orb to rotate with mouse movement. At this point I painted three tiles as a solid colour for grass, dirt and water, and made a simple map. And then slowed down a bit.

I worked on bullets next, which made sense for them to be little soul flames. I still have to add a way for souls to fade away so the player doesn't have infinite ammo. But, I needed people to shoot and transmutate. So I made the villager with animations and two versions for male and female. I randomize the hue to get a bit of randomness.

Finally, I tried to work on an image interpreter where a pixel represented a tile. It works. I have interpreters for text, csv, png and json (I've experimented before), but the thing is that when you export the game it doesn't work. You have to import the png as an image and couldn't modify the code to fix it in time. So I made a map by hand for the end and with 6 minutes to spare...

I failed to submit the game for a minute because I forgot my discord numbers, and a bunch of things prior to that.

The Future

I already added some more assets to the scene to the point I'm happy with a little more stuff to cover up a solid green grass texture. I want to add a way to collect souls, leaving the villagers in a soulless state. I want to add the multiple souls orbiting the orb, and a way to expend souls (black market or as ammo or boosts). Maybe add some shaders since I haven't done that at all since I started developing games. And a cave as a base for the player. Then I would say the jam game is complete.