RoachGame - Developer Commentary

Welcome to RoachGame!

I worked on this project for a little over 2 years with some friends. But it was never finished. I had a lot of fun, and struggle, these last two weeks, digging through my old code and throwing together a little adventure with the tools at my disposal. I'm much more experienced in Godot now, so this was a really interesting reflection for me, and playtesters liked it too, I guess.

NOTE:

I didn't have time to re-record the instruction to "Press Ctrl". Please do not hold Ctrl while moving. You will press Ctrl+W and close the tab. I've bound the L key to do the same thing, so you can still use the same function.

What to expect

10-20 minute adventure platformer game centered on a developer commentary. I wanted to talk about a lot more than I had time for, but this is just a game jam project so I was limited by how much time I could spend making levels and how much time I could expect people to invest. This is definitely on the longer side of what I would want to submit for a jam entry, but your progress is saved automatically, and I swear it's worthwhile :) 

(Even taking a break and coming back might reveal things to you that you didn't notice before. You'll know it when you see it)

This is also a thoroughly weird platformer. Mostly from that era of everyone's programming career where I was allergic to tutorials and conventions, and reinvented the wheel, sometimes literally, at every opportunity. Calling it a platformer at all feels like it doesn't quite encapsulate the feel of moving around. Years of work means years of playing around, so I move around these environments very smoothly, despite the strangeness. Some testers were able to move around just fine after only a little bit of adjustment. I'm genuinely curious how the movement feels for people, good or bad.

Credits

Core team:

 - Me! Programming, design, modeling, animation, audio... anything that isn't explicitly listed anywhere else was something I took care of.

 - Original concept, text dialogue system integration, and lots of testing of earlier versions: https://r0setea.itch.io/

 - Textures in the Sewer level: someone who's not me (I don't think they have an itch)

 - My roommate for playtesting. Nothing gets to you guys before it goes through him. I can't believe I got him to take a break from silksong!

External assets

 - Freesound: dasrealized (crawling), karinalarasart (pool-pump as water slide/bucket fill), qubodup (big-water-splash as bucket pour), kyles (swimming-competition as player splash effect), profispiesser (bg-sasc-turkey-slow-medium-waves... as shoreline sound), klankbleed (waves-sand-beach-017 as distant waves), iainmccurdy (downpour-and-thunder as bucket pour), lalalaal12 (transition-sound-or-jump-sound as jump)

Tools

 - Godot 4.4. Can't wait to try out 4.5 next

 - Blender ??? I forgot the version I'm really tired. It actually played a large role in the design, not just the modeling, since I was using a ton of export hints with Godot's provided .blend import system.

 - Ableton and Logic. The music was made in a variety of locations on a variety of setups. Despite being all midi and simple voice recording, the palette is pretty diverse. Though I would have liked a chance to revisit some of those instruments.

 - Audacity. Simple sample editing at home.