How to Clone Yourself

• 

  Dum Clones in Action

• 

  Endscreen (for now...)

• 

  Main Menu Screen

• 

  Messing Around

• 

  Bouncy Clones Emerging

• 

  Making it

My Inspiration:

One of the first things I did when I started coding, back when I was still on Scratch, was making a platformer game. It didn't have any cool gimmick or anything, but at the time, it was cool, even though I always thought I could've made more. Fast forward to now, and the theme for the hackathon is cloning, which I noticed was a pretty interesting gimmick for a platformer game. So I based it off the Geometry Dash level "How to Platformer," loaded up Godot, and got started. My inspiration is to make old me proud.

How I Built my Project:

I used a few different tools. The main one was definitely Godot. In my opinion, it does a lot better job with appealing to new game developers than Unity or Unreal does, as there's an easy-to-read UI/UX, a far easier way to group and create objects using Nodes, and it even has built-in documentation that you can open up inside of it. Another resource I used was Paint.NET. It's easily the best free piece of software for making 2D game assets, as it comes with a lot of the features the other paid pieces of software have, like layering or more advanced selection tools. I also used many different forums sites like the Godot Forums and StackOverflow for some of the bugs in my code. The official documentation for Godot also came in handy.

(No Generative AI was used in the making of this project.)

What I learned:

There are a few lessons I learned about coding and about life in general. The first one, which goes for both, is that if something like a feature you made is too buggy/unfixable, just replace it with a dumber feature that fulfills the same purpose. I was going to add a feature where you could delete individual clones, but when it got so buggy to the point of my project not even wanting to run, I just deleted it and added a reset level button (lol). Another one I learned is that if you can't copy it, do it yourself. I wanted to make a Metroidvania-style room camera system, but all the tutorials I watched required some pretty complicated math and functions to do it. So, I built it myself, and it works just as good as the videos for way simpler code. It goes to show how sometimes making stuff yourself is the better option. The last thing I learned is that anything is possible if you give yourself a deadline and enough willpower. I've never made a full gimmicky game before, let alone in the time span of basically 24 hours. But, with the deadline of 12PM and my want to finish the game, I did it, and it's probably the best game I've ever made in Godot or entirely.

Challenges I faced:

Challenges usually didn't arise, but when they did, they were tricky to figure out. For example, I spent almost an hour trying to bugfix a piece of my code, and it turned out to be me writing a signal in Godot wrong. I think the main problem in that sector is that some function and signal names have changed since the last time I used Godot, which was around five updates ago, (almost a year). With that outdated knowledge, it can be hard to bugfix, as you don't know what function is what name or if it even changed functionality entirely. One more, less major challenge that arose was LCPS's Wi-Fi. They network blocked Discord, Reddit, some forum sites, and YouTube comment sections (very underrated for bugfixing), which is where a lot of discussions how to solve different problems in coding are discussed. Discord being blocked was probably the worst, since only there can you get almost instant answers on whatever you're having trouble on. All of that probably wasted me around 1-2 hours of working since I couldn't find the solution of bugs I was having.

Credits:

Thank you the Academies of Loudoun and AcademiesHack for the event and theme, it was a lot of fun!

Thank you thearmyants for inspiring the artstyle and room progression system with "How to Platformer."

Thank you herrspaten for the lowest closest number algorithm.

Thank you Brackeys for that awesome hour long Godot video.

Thank you Nad Labs for teaching me how to use signals.

Last but not least, thank you random various people on the Godot forums that answered the questions I had.

*Note for the Github repo, you have to download the zip it doesn't show the files right on Github itself

Built With

• gdscript
• godot