The Great Goblin Party

Play on Itch.io
Source code on Github: https://github.com/jani-nykanen/the-great-goblin-party

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Project background: There were three goals:
1) Program a game in Go.
2) Make game without telling anyone about it until it's finished (excluding last minute "does it run on Windows" testing)
3) Make music by yourself
Every goal was accomplished.

I'll write about my experiences with Go later in another blog, hopefully. I can say this, though: Go is not a bad language, but it's not very good either. It feels a little incomplete, and not the best choice for game development. At least I have made another game in Go, now, and this time in proper Go code (no more global variables and other shit, like in The Flying Cat Stomper...). By proper Go code I mean code that got accepted by the default Go tools in vscode.

The whole project was done in 8 or 9 days (there was some inactivity in last Wednesday, so I say 8), from scratch, there was very little code I could have reused, and that code required a lot of rewriting. Every stage in the game was done in within two hours, although I modified move limits afterwards.
But why didn't I want to tell anyone about this project? Simple: consider a case where I'm doing a game for a game jam. Very likely I cannot do much beta testing and may not have time to share gifs and stuff, so I can only trust my own opinion what makes a good game. I had to trust only my "own instinct". 

Considering these things, the result was surprisingly good, although like some people have mentioned, difficulty level is a little too high on some stages, thanks to the move limit, which is possibly unnecessary. It never occurred me the game could be so hard for some people, in my opinion only the level 7 is truly hard.

I made all the music (two tracks...) for this game by myself, first time in several years. My previous attempts have been terrible, but this time the music turned out to be okay, it fits the game and does not hurt one's ears. I'm trying to learn to make music so I can do it in short game jams (like LD) where I cannot have my friend do the music for me.

Anyways, this was a nice little experiment, and it's always fun to make puzzle games. My next game will probably be a tiny Christmas-themed arcade game, because that's something I can get finished for sure before Christmas.

The Faceless Mountain

Description (from itch.io, not gonna write the same text twice):  The Faceless Mountain is a short rage-game where you climb a slippery mountain. Use your face (!) as a grappling hook to reach places where your poor jumping skills would never get you. Avoid enemies and spike traps. They cannot kill you, but they will knock you back, and of course you don't want to drown in the black ocean!


Link: https://jani-nykanen.itch.io/the-faceless-mountain


If the game does not interest you, here's some cover art I made for it

Gamedev Update #3

Short update

- I didn't want to post a video where I climb the "mountain" so I made one where I come down.
- "The End" sign will be replaced with a slightly better goal (a giant start or something) 
- I still haven't played the game through, so I might make some changes to the game world, but it's mostly final
- I tried to add as many "path options" (routes, that's the word) as possible, so you can try different routes each time to get better time