Hungry Beards

THIS PROJECT IS NOT IN A PLAYABLE STATE YET, THERE AREN'T ANY LEVELS EITHER SO DON'T EXPECT TO DOWNLOAD A TRUE GAME

The original concept was to include this jam's theme (growth) with a game mechanic that allows your beard to grow when eating berries, hence the hungry beards name... But in the middle of the jam I hit my head while playing basketball and got a concussion lmao. It kinda threw off my whole game jam schedule so in the end I ended up making a simple Celeste clone.  I might keep updating it post-jam or make it the base of a completely fresh project, I will keep this description updated.

This is my first actual game project, made in 14 days for My First Game Jam: Winter 2023

The story behind the game

I had already made a few simple web games in JavaScript (a hangman and a quizz), but this game jam pushed me towards something totally different. It was my first time working with an engine, I chose the Godot engine after struggling with unity for a while (thank you my old laptop). 

It was also my very first time making all the assets and songs for a game. I spent a bit too much time making the art though and could have added the growth mechanic if I hadn't done so. But for my personal growth, it was well worth it: seeing my drawings take life for the first time was soo cool and at least I know that I love doing art now.

Credits

Music by me using BeepBox

Pixel art by me using Aseprite, following Saultoons' tutorials

Game and level design by me, greatly inspired by the game Celeste

Sound effects from Mixkit

Parallax background assets from here: https://github.com/bitbrain/godot-tutorials/tree/main/parallax-scrolling

Edit: Story by my sister (added post-jam)

How it was made

The code was made by squashing together a ton of tutorials.

I started by following GDquest's 2D game tutorial series:

I then added this dash:

And I included some of these tips:

I also used a ton of help from more specific videos and stack overflow posts.

During development I think I made each mistake listed in this video:

I tried to fix some of them but yeah, I think I've succeeded at failing to make a platformer.

All the code was (re)typed and adapted by me, and I tried to understand all the stuff that I use. It's a terrible mess in there and I'm glad I chose a pixel art style because otherwise I'd probably have some performance issues.

Conclusion

In the end, I was able to code basic things such as the dust particles and the squash effect during the jump by myself. I had also learnt the principles of pixel art animation and level design and had made some decent goofy music. So I'd say overall this gameJam was a success for me : I learnt a lot and I want to make even more games now

That's about it, thank you for reading. I'd love to hear what you have to say about the tiny bit of gameplay available. Have a great day!