First week of Godot

Hey Kinoko Fans!

First of all, thanks for joining the Kinoko Fan Club! If you're seeing that post, that means you're one of our very first Patreon supporters and we can't thank you enough for that! We plan to do a lot of blog posts (shorter and more frequent than the ones we post on our website) over here for Kinoko Fan Club members, as well as lots of never-before-seen videos and artwork, so you're in the right place if you want the very latest updates on the game and project.

So, about our game then. It's been a full week now since Unity turned many a game developer's life upside down with the announcement of their half-baked Unity Runtime Fee. If you haven't seen it yet, I published a blog post on this on Saturday, basically going over how it's affected us (not as much as it's affected other game devs, we're happy to say) and what it means for our plans going forward.

If you're following my personal account on Twitter, you might've spotted me posting small video updates throughout the week. I installed Godot - an alternative game engine - the day the Unity news broke, and although there are whispers on the air that Unity may be about to revise their proposed Unity Runtime Fee plans with concessions like a percentage cap and not applying the changes retroactively, I don't personally see us going back. I'm having a great time with Godot, and I'm happy with where we're at in it after only a week of learning and building.

Anyway, the video above is a short clip which basically demonstrates everything we've done for the new build of the game thus far, since getting started in Godot last Tuesday evening. I tried to include everything that's working so far. Kinoko can run, jump and fly so far, and we've got a couple of playable levels (minus a few floating platforms). We've reinstated the transitions between scenes, and you might also see that I've added in a meteorite pickup, which in the Unity build were how Kinoko got starsprites. Starsprites are more complex than anything I've added so far, but they're next on the list so I'll be working hard this week to figure out how Godot handles things like spawning instances of objects and what we can do in terms of having the starsprites follow Kinoko around.

Chelsey and I both have commissions on at the moment - she several art pieces, and myself a website - and right now it's a bit of a balancing act on both our parts to develop the game whilst also meeting our work deadlines, but we're both shutting up shop for the foreseeable future once we're done with these to dedicate more time to the game. I'll be doing my very best to get starsprites added and working this week, but I'm hopeful that we'll quickly get back to adding in all the other levels that the Unity build had and maybe adding the raygun back in too.

Obviously, when we get around to those things, you'll be the first to see them!

Stay tuned for more exclusive content coming throughout the week, and again thank you so much for joining the Kinoko Fan Club! It really means a lot to us!