Click Star: The Making Of

"Oh, hi!"

The idea of click star actually came to be after I realized that the level of knowledge and skill required for the level of games I wanted to create was way out of my field. I began with a want: to make games. I started to learn code by following a website called learncpp. It is a website created by Alex and it is a great place to start learning C++ but also the concepts of coding (which was what helped me tremendously).  As a beginner, I had no idea how much I needed to understand how a computer understands a human’s input. 

Before knowing anything, I had big ideas for a game. Too big for a newbie like me. So I scaled down my idea to something more tangible... A clicker game! Honestly, I don’t remember how the whole outer space and rocket theme came to be. I guess it’s like a big bang. It starts from one interest of a genre and before you know it, there’s a gremlin with some shop items and a star smoking a cigarette. I had the idea, and I had what I wanted the game to be. The next step would be actual development. 

Choosing a game engine to work is a personal choice. There’s a couple things for me that I liked about Godot that made me choose it.  One, it’s free. Can’t go wrong with that price point.  Two, there’s no need to sign up. I don’t like signing up for stuff. Especially if I don’t know if the thing I’m signing up for is something I’ll actually like and use. I did look into other game engines, most notably game maker and rpg maker, but you know, cost free and sign up free. I like those.  I remember how I first started out Godot. It was a video tutorial by Coco Code. I followed the tutorial to the end, and right away went to create a design document (woo!). Formatting for the design document was from PirateSoftware’s website. 

The original name of the game was: Click Again. Boring. Above was a rough draft for the starting screen. Not much of a difference. I drew it in krita and decided pixel font was better and Click Star was wayy better when opening up Godot and working on the scene. 

The game play for Click Star was similar in soul but different in execution. There was a thing called ‘distance traveled’ which was the accumulation of points acquired by the player’s clicks and shop item effects. Another thing was ‘milestones’. Milestones were supposed to be events that - once reached - unlocked a fun mini game for the player. Reaching the final milestone would complete the journey and show the ending scene shown in the final version of the game. 

The Coding

Oh my heart, the coding. The coding was perhaps the hardest thing out of everything. Learning the user interface of the Godot engine took some time figuring out but, heavens the coding. Some things were easy, some things were hard. It was like following recipes but not knowing if said recipes work together, and if it was going to be edible to the customer. Even worse is that I stopped at lesson 2.7 out of 28.7 from the learncpp website. I probably spent the most time on the shop items. I actually still don’t like how the final look of the shop ended up being. I wanted more animation, more presentation! But in terms of how it actually looks in game, it’s fine. 

The Music

All music heard in the game was created by me, a beginner yet again, in garage band on my 2019 iPad. This was the second most time consuming.

Unused Content 

Now to the part I really wanted to talk about. The REASON why I wrote a documentary on the butt end of sliced bread:

UNUSED SPRITES

I used an amazing plug in for the dialogue balloon called Dialogue Manager by Nathan Hoad and I like it a lot, but I could not figure out how to change the sprites to a different image when certain sentences are being said. The dialogue for the gremlin ended up being a lot shorter and had a little less emotional range because of it. It wasn’t really a game breaker. I like how it turned out in the end, but I spent an agonizing time trying to figure it out. 

Yup. I am happy. I got to talk about these sprites. 

Okay, that’s it! bye-bye