1/11/2025
Hello all!
Quickie update today – just finished being able to track and place all of the items the player can collect in the game as well as when boss fights and puzzles have been completed. Also updated a bunch of bugs.
Next step is building out the map that the game will use along with being able to teleport around at teleportation points!
Onward and Upward!
-Charles
December 19, 2024
Long time no see everyone! Big update to make today! After close to 9 months of work I have finally completed the backgrounds for all the rooms and levels in the game!
This is a step I’ve been dreading to for years as I wasn’t sure I could pull it off, but I’m happy to say after getting a flow of things the work is completed! What that also means is that I have a mostly functional came at this point too. Man what a journey.
We are coming onto 5 years since the start of the project in March of 2025 and after all this time I can say that I can finally see a light at the end of the tunnel. There is still a tremendous amount of work left to be done, but man is getting to this point an accomplishment.
Next steps from here are going to be recording some additional animations for a couple enemy types (my wife is going to be doing the recordings for those), then it’s fixing more bugs, make updates to sound effects, making music and then the next real big task is going to be working on cut scenes!
Exciting stuff ahead, looking forward to sharing more things as we progress!
-Charles
6.30.24
Hello hello, I’ve made good progress on the game so time for a new update!
For the last month or so I’ve doing a variety of things – specifically fixing known bugs and (the big thing) running through and fully playing each room and level in the game and making adjustments to the gameplay and design.
Happy to say that process is completed (though I’m sure more of adjustments will be coming as the game progresses). Overall – I didn’t have to make too many crazy adjustments from what I had already built – it was more changing what enemies where where in which places. Also a little bit of redesigning a few puzzle and platform areas – but not in a big way.
It’s a great milestone to hit that and now I move onto the next HUGE part of the game making process.
The next huge lift for the game which has begun is building all of the art for the backgrounds of the game. I’ve already gotten started on the process and have 9 rooms built out so far – so only 191 left to go, lol. If I’m lucky I’ll have this part of the process completed in the next year.
My hope is that it will take me about as much time to make the backgrounds as it took to build the levels out themselves. It’s a big lift and a part of the process I’ve been anxious about starting – but here we are.
The way I’m making the backgrounds is primarily by taking photos – either ones I’ve taken or things I find on Unsplash – and cutting them, then collaging them together and animating them in Photoshop and After Effects.
So far so good. But I’m gonna be in this space for a while now.
So that’s the update for now! As always take a look at my socials (linked in the footer) to see shots and video clips of progress!
Until next time.
-Charles
5.11.24
So after working almost a year on this process (or at least what felt like almost a year), I’ve finally put together all of the rooms and levels for the game. Phew!
I’m not sure what the final end number is for the rooms as I haven’t counted them, but it’s a bit under 200. The original room count I had sketched out was 200, but I ended up combing some of them. If I had to guess off the top of my head it’s probably somewhere around 185 rooms I guess? Somewhere between 180 to 190? A whole bunch.
Needless to say this is a major milestone so going to take a moment to celebrate it and then it’s back to the grindstone. There’s still tons and tons of work left to do – the biggest task of all likely is going to be making the backgrounds for all of the rooms, though that’s going to come a bit later down the road.
First task up next is fixing bugs I’ve discovered in the process of the making the rooms and levels and then running through all of the rooms and levels over and over again and adjusting things. Once that process is done then it’s on to making some more animations, doing some more writing, fiddling with menus and save points and then doing backgrounds.
The final step in the process of everything is probably going to be making the cut scenes and recording the other actors who will be NPCs. It’s gonna still be years before this project is done, but I really do feel a wonderful sense of accomplishment over how far it’s come. Getting the rooms completed is a major stepping point.
In other big news I think I’ve settled on a new name for the game! For now at least…
As I mentioned in the previous blog post, I discovered there’s another game that exists with a name very similar to “Lair of the Insect God”, so I want to change the name as to not confuse anyone.
So after much mulling I’ve decided for the time being to change the name to “OBEY THE INSECT GOD”. As always, until actual launch date, this name is very subject to change. In fact this is actually the 2nd name change the game has gone through so far (originally I was just going to call it “Insect God”). I’m also going to be changing the name of the main character … I think? Who knows. Lots of wonderful strange things left to discover in this process.
That’s the update for now! I’ve posted some more video of the game on my personal Instagram linked to in the footer, so check it out!
Thanks all!
-Charles
April 11th, 2024
Hey all!
Just a quickie update as I have written in a while. Level building continues! That’s about it lol. I continue to work on it every day and have gotten really far so far. The game is coming together nicely, but there’s not really much new to report on other than just continuing to plug away at it.
On another topic – I’ve decided to change the name of the game from Lair of the Insect God to something else. This is due to both me discovering that there was another game released a few years ago which has a very similar name to this already and I don’t want to get them confused – and also because the story of the game has taken a bit of a different shape and I don’t know if the name fits really anymore.
I’ve narrowed down the name to a few new things which shall be revealed at a later date! This is the 2nd time I will have changed the name of the game – thus is the life of making things.
Anyway, back to it!
-Charles
Hey All! Just a real quick update as I realized I haven’t written a blog post in months – progress continues!
I haven’t really written anything because there haven’t been any super big updates to talk about. I’m knee deep currently in the process of actually building out the levels/rooms for the game. Currently I’m doing about one room a day. So with a little under 200 rooms to do this is basically be the state that I’ll be in for the next several months.
Overall, things are progressing nicely, but there probably won’t be a bunch of new stuff to write about until I’m through that process.
I had previously mentioned that I was thinking about releasing a demo for the game, but I think I’m on the fence now about that. As I’m discovering, as the game and level build out progressing, there are certain things I’m deciding to change in it in terms of design. So far nothing particularly significant – but in case I do decided to make a big change at some point as I’m going through this process, I don’t want to “bait and switch” people who might play a demo.
I could definitely see a demo coming out at some point in the future, but I think I need to get more of the game down solid in terms of the flow and level design before I’m confident enough to do that.
Either way, that’s about all progress for now. I shall continue to build out the rooms everyday and once that’s done it’s going to be a lot of testing and playing to get down the game flow after all the rooms are created. And then there will be about a billion other steps after that.
Thanks!
-Charles
Hi Everyone!
Just wanted to do another quickie update to know I’m still here! Work continues on the game and I’m still planning on putting together a demo – however before I can start the demo I need to lock down a date for the actress I’m going to be working with to record a certain enemy animation. That actress is my wife. Wish me luck.
In the meantime I’m continuing to chip away at building out the actual levels for the game. Yesterday I finished another area in the game – so now I have two areas down and 14 rooms competed (out of 200 rooms). Only 86 more rooms to go! LOL.
I wish I had more to say to about the process right now, but frankly a lot of the work is just rinse and repeat really. Now that I have all the sketches in places the work mainly consists of laying down floors, walls and platforms and then placing enemies and environmental obstacles around. I’m also fixing glitches I’m finding as I progress along the way.
I’ll probably have a bigger post and more multi-media to show once we record the enemy animations I’m waiting on and then it will demo construction time!
Exciting stuff!
In the meantime I’ll keep chipping away at it every day!
-Charles
Hello all! Another quickie update on game progress today – this one all about backgrounds and foregrounds – particularly of the Parallax kind.
I’ve made good progress on the first “area” of the game and have finally finished putting together the backgrounds (and foregrounds) for the levels. This initial first area is actually pretty much done at this point – woo hoo!
As this is a 2D game, since the beginning I had a grand vision for making big use of “Parallax” backgrounds and foregrounds throughout the game. For those who don’t know this is where you have the background move at a different speed from how the player is moving. When you do this it creates a cool effect that adds a feeling of depth to the scene.
Working out the Parallax backgrounds ended up being way more challenging then I initially thought (as is usual with most things related to this game, lol). This was true on multiple levels – first the technical standpoint (how does Godot actually code this thing out) and then on a workflow standpoint (how do you break up the different sections of the background).
The Godot part was and wasn’t intuitive – there is a special feature in Godot just for creating parallax backgrounds, which was simple enough to understand, but the way the “parallax background node” works got confusing real quick when it came to applying multiple parallax backgrounds on a single scene but across several different rooms.
Basically the way it works is that you have to set a multiplier for what speed the background moves in relation to the camera as it follows the player, but that multiplier always uses the “starting” point for the master scene as it’s refence for the multiplier. So it took me a while to figure out that if you are adding multiple backgrounds across multiple rooms in a single “scene”, you need to change what the multiplier is for the backgrounds for each room the farther away you get from the “start point” for the master scene that holds all the rooms.
Confused yet? It’s hard to explain and took me probably a week to figure the whole thing out, but I finally got it and things are looking good. I definitely have a solid understanding of how to set these parallax backgrounds and foregrounds up moving forward as I make more rooms – so the education was worth the time lol.
The other aspect was figuring out the workflow for how to actually make the different backgrounds in photoshop in the correct dimensions so that it matches up with the floor and ceilings that the player is standing on. Again – a lot of trial and error – but I finally found out I basically just need to take a screen shot of the full room I’m making a background for and then just match that up to the background I’m making in photoshop. Took a while to get, but now that I have it down I think I’ll definitely be a lot faster making them moving forward.
So that’s where I’m at at the moment! The next big thing I’m probably going to tackle is figuring out how to do cut scenes in Godot, wish me luck!
As always you can check out some footage from my parallax backgrounds on my social media accounts linked in the footer,
Thanks!
-Charles
Hi All! So I’ve decided I wanted to start trying to do occasional “quickie” updates – where I just quickly give an update on the current stat of things with no frill or pictures. Something I could quickly write out in like 10 – 15 minutes for a bit more consistency with the blog. I’m still planning on doing the normal “longer” posts, but those by their nature take me a bit of time to put together, so this is my attempt to do something faster and more frequenct
Last we left off I was working on putting together the initial rooms that will make up the first “level” (or area, or segment, whatever you want to call it) of the game. This is completed! Putting the actual level together wasn’t that hard because of all the prep work I had already done, so a lot of it was running through the level over and over again and adjusting things.
Having built the first level in completion was a really good first step too because it showed me a bunch of stuff I needed to change with how the structure of the game is from the back end – particularly when it comes to transferring the player in-between rooms, in between levels, accessing save points and enter menus.
All of this ultimately led me to redoing the camera for the game and completely revisioning how the architecture of the “scenes” or “nodes” (as they are called in Godot” are laid out. It took a while but ended up being real important stuff.
After going through the experience of building out the first level, the game menus and the save features – i realized there is still a lot left to learn about how the game is going to need to be structured form a back end stand point.
As such, I’m actually contemplating putting a hold on building out further levels and just focusing on getting this one level completely finished and then releasing it as a demo – to see how other people’s computers react to it when they play it. I figure now is a good to get all of this setup and figured out in terms of issues when I’m just dealing with one level, rather than working to build out everything for every level, discover there was a major issues, then having to go back and change everything for all 200 levels in the game – yikes!
So this is my current thinking – not guaranteed yet I’ll do this as there is still a lot to figure out – including backgrounds and cut scenes for the game. But I think this may be the correct direction.
Exciting stuff!
Ok, that’s all for this quickie update, as always feel free to follow along with my posts on my social media accounts, linked in the foots.
-Charles
Hello there everyone! I’ve made some nice progress on the game over the last month and a half so it’s time for an update. I’ll be going over the process I went through to design out the levels in the game, starting to actually build the levels in the game and then dealing with changing levels as the player progresses.
So as I mentioned before my process for designing out the levels all pretty much happened with pencil and paper – OLD SCHOOL STYLE. I know there are more advanced ways to design out a level on a computer, but for how my brain works I just found good old pencil and paper to be the fastest and easiest way to get things down.
My first step was just drawing a bunch of boxes that connected to each other by lines (I had mentioned this in the last blog). Each box signified a “room” in the level of the game, what the focus of each of the subsections of the rooms was (platforming, fighting, both) and what next rooms it connects to.
Once that was all in place it was time to start actually drawing things out for each room box I had mapped out. My artistic skills are terrible, but thankfully all I really needed was a rough guide for what the rooms were going to contain that I could follow when I actually started building things out in Godot.
So stick figures it was, lol. After about a month or so of drawing everything out (200 rooms total) I felt I was in a good place with my stick figure designs. The process also changed my mind on a few design decisions I was thinking of – but I don’t want to spoil anything too bad on that lol.
So now that the drawings of everything were all done it was time for the actual build out in Godot. The process so far hasn’t been too surprising, as I had already built out some stages for boss fights and puzzles previously. It mostly follows the same logic for each room: build the box of the room with the floor, walls and ceilings, then place the platforms and traps, then place the enemies.
Once all that is done it’s testing time. The longest part of the process I’m finding for building out the rooms is just playing through them over and over again to see how they feel. There’s a lot of adjustment that happens once you go through that – either by changing the way one platform sections flows or swapping out enemy types or adding enemies, etc.
At the moment I have 7 rooms built out (of 200) and the entire first “area” of the game is completed (for now). No doubt things will change as I run through and test it more.
Now that the initial rooms are built out I’ve decided I’m going to pause on building out more levels until I have these 7 initial rooms completely done – including background, cut scenes, functional saves, etc. The reason for this is that as I was coding out the way the player will be moved from one room to the next it became apparent that the way you code out something as seemingly simple as that (it wasn’t) can actually effect design decisions of the game on the back end. Particularly stuff related to how the game is structured in the engine. I’m sure I’m going to get more surprises on how things need to be built out the more features I add to the levels, so I figured now is a good time to stop and work all of that out before I progress more. I’d hate to spend time building out 200 levels just to find out I need to go back into each one individually and restructure everything – ugh.
Speaking of ugh, I discovered that coding out moving in between rooms (or scenes as we call them in Godot) is way more complicated that you’d think it was. As the game is designed out I want to carry over the player from one scene to the next – instead of having a player character in each level already loaded and then dumping the previous player character. The reason for this is that there is a bunch of information on the player character at all times that would be too cumbersome to transfer over to a new player character each time they change a room (i.e. health level, current camera zoom setting, selected special abilities).
So my choice was to keep the player character static at all times, dump the current level, upload the new level and then place the player character in the new level. This isn’t the “standard” way of doing things as I’ve read, but I think it’ll work best for me.
Figuring out the code for doing something like that was nuts – including getting a loading screen to show while the whole process is taking place in the background. After spending an entire weekend and watching/reading about 15 tutorials thankfully I was able to figure it out – and as of Saturday it seems to be working as ended.
Part of the problem of finding the correct tutorials to guide me on this is that I’m still using Godot 3 (currently 3.5.2, but will switch to 3.6 when it comes out). The newest release for Godot is 4. I downloaded Godot 4.1 and tried porting over the game – but it was a no go. Unfortunately I’m so deep into development into the game at this point (it’s been 3.5 years as this point I’ve been working on it) that the way the game is built and coded out is now very specific to Godot 3. There’s enough different with the functions and way you code in Godot 4 that in order to transfer the game order I basically would have to rewrite huge amounts of the scripts for the bazillion scenes that currently exist for the game. Not gonna happen unfortunately. So I’m sticking with Godot 3 for this project.
I am a bit nervous about total support for Godot 3 being dropped in the future (as this project still has yeaaars to completion) and how that’s going to effect my ability to port the game to consoles – but as it is there’s not much to be done about it. Will need to cross that bridge when I come to it.
Well that’s it for now! As always check out my social media pages in the footer if you want to see some live video of the game in action!
Thanks!
-Charles