Godot Development: First Public Demo Build

Hey guys, Rriik here! Today I have something special for all of you. This is the first public test build of the Godot port for our game!

First off, why Godot?

As a disclaimer, these are my personal preferences and experiences using both Ren'Py and Godot. My choice reflects what I found to work best in my case, but it doesn't mean it should apply to everyone.

Godot Engine is a free, open-source and multi-platform engine, with a growing community behind it. It has seen major improvements over the past years and it's shaping up to be an open source and lightweight alternative to Unity, with fully dedicated 2D and 3D backends, designed to be versatile and easy to use. I am a fan of open source software and transparency, and Godot is the most well-developed and feature-packed open engine I know of.

Although also open-source, Ren'Py focuses solely on developing visual novel games. However, it has a few fundamental flaws, such as a missing IDE (which I find much easier to work with especially for heavily visual-based games) and very poor mobile support (Ren'Py only ports about half of all the Python modules to mobile), which made using it very frustrating.

Overall, I just found it much easier to start with a clean sheet, create my own version of Ren'Py and apply what I've learned from it over to the port, than to try and rewrite most of the default Ren'Py framework for the game and deal with lots of anger. After all, you don't want to make a raptor angry :P

Overview

I started working on this alternate game port in May 2018. It has been almost 10 months of on and off work, though most of it was done during the summer and between December-February when I had more free time on my hands. Right now, the backbone of the game framework and a first iteration of the save system have been completed. And that's pretty much 50% of the total programming work needed to get this type of game running.

The demo is only available on Windows for now. Even though Godot can port projects seamlessly between PC, mobile and web platforms, it's still something I need to look into more and figure out the specific quirks of.

It includes the first day of the story in a format similar to Ren'Py, but tweaked to follow personal experience after working with the Ren'Py systems and applicability within the Godot editor. Here's a snippet of how it looks in engine:

Known issues so far:

• The game runs at 1080p native resolution, however resizing the window produces wonky interface layouts. I haven't spent much time working on GUI/layout configuration, that is something which will come in the future. I recommend using a 1080p or larger monitor.
• Thumbnail compression for save files doesn't work currently due to a couple of engine-related image compression bugs which should hopefully be fixed by the time Godot 3.1 rolls out (in a month or so). I contributed to discovering them and bringing them up to the Godot developers (https://github.com/godotengine/godot/issues/25640 and https://github.com/godotengine/godot/issues/25595). The thumbnails will still load but they won't be compressed and that will result in bigger save file dimensions.
• Most of the UI elements use the default Godot/Ren'Py UIs, obviously there will be many improvements to that in later versions. 
• The behaviour for 'move' transitions isn't written yet, there will be some warnings about unconfigured behaviour for it. I will be adding that in due time.

What comes next

• Adding more interface menus (Options, Backlog, Credits, etc.) and improving existing ones with better GUI/layout
• Improving input methods and making them work similarly to Ren'Py
• Bringing additional features to the framework (Skipping, Sounds, Character side images, and many other sublime additions to the progression system)
• Improving the save system (currently it is functional but there's still work to be done on balancing its complexity with its ability to load games reliably and adding more data to the save files)

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I have to admit, this whole project has been and continues to be a learning experience for me, however I've been enjoying every moment of it. And I hope you guys will too! Please tell us what you think of this in the comments! :3