Cheese Quest

Inspiration

After playing many video games, we did not imagine it was possible to make our own until we stumbled upon a YouTube game tutorial on the Godot engine.

What it does

A simple 2D platformer where you play as a mouse, and your goal is to collect all the pieces of cheese scattered throughout the living room.

How we built it

In the Godot engine, with scripts running off of GDScript. Sprites and tilesets were made using a combination of Piskel and Aseprite. The title and end screen were made on flipaclip. Background music was made in BeepBox. Sound effects were recorded live: with a ukulele to represent the jump effect, a kalimba for the winner jingle, a squeaky floor for the death sound, and eating cereal for the crunch sound effect when you collect cheese. I used a reference of a dog running for the running animation of the mouse.

Challenges we ran into

Managing audio and making sure sound effects and background music played and looped properly was a difficult thing to implement for us. GDScript is also a brand new language for the both of us, so trying to write functional scripts in it proved to be a tough but welcome challenge, involving lots of trial and error. This was Andrea's first time to work on pixel art, and both of our first time working on the godot engine. Working with pixel art is difficult, as you want the movement to be readable despite the low resolution.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are both very happy with how the sprites for interactable entities within the game turned out. We split the work into two halves, character sprite design and map environment design, and we worked on those two halves separately, while checking in periodically to make sure we were both on the same page. Overall, we think it turned out really nice and we managed our time decently. The sound effects were the most fun to make, and we took turns fixing each other's errors in code.

What we learned

We learned quite a bit about how we should go about making background and environment tilesets, as well as how to implement audio. It definitely feels like we've improved at writing code in GDScript too. Sometimes the pixel program crashed and we had to redraw everything, so it was hard lesson to always have backups saved.