Silver-Streak made a game!

What did you do?

I made a Castlevania-style platformer. Well, sort of. I made a 1 level demo with a title screen. However, it has:

• A working title screen.
• A hero character with jump, attack, idle, move, and dash animations.
• A working HUD showing your player health, lives, and current stamina.
• A dash with invincibility frames.
• Knockback with invinicility frames.
• Enemies with full animations, different AI/behaviors, HP, and damage stats.
• A full level with a custom layout.
• A boss room with boss.
• End credits.

In theory, with all of this done I could iterate and create additional levels relatively easily. I might do that sometime.

Where can I play it?

GDevelop 5 lets you export your games to HTML and upload directly to itch.io, so you can go right here to play: https://silver-streak.itch.io/not-a-vania

Feel free to leave any feedback you like either on Itch.io or here. I also uploaded my project files with comments throughout. This is for everyone to freely download and look through if they want to learn how I did some of the stuff in the platformer.

Why did you do this?

I had a game idea rattling around in my head, and wanted to learn a game engine that could possibly accomplish it. I saw a bunch of examples for multiple engines that were focused around building a platformer, so I decided to try that.

Now that this is done, I'll take a small break and move on to what I originally wanted to make.

How did you do this?

First, I used @zandravandra's fantastic post around Giant Rom and the Giant Rom Boot Camp.

After reading up on various engines, I originally started messing with Stencyl. While looking into what else was available, I realized I had a GameMaker Studio 2 license hanging around from years ago, and also found "Godot".

My goal was to do as little coding as possible. I know a decent amount of JavaScript, and used to know C# very well, but didn't want to freshen up for the small projects I intended to do.

As I began to dug into those, I realized a few things:

• GameMaker Studio 2 makes a lot of real complex things real simple (player movement, stats, etc). However, some things that should be really easy end up being complex (making a GUI, or a title screen, aligning text with other text on the screen, etc)
• Godot is SUPER flexible, to the point where it seems like a real (free) competitor for Unity. However it currently requires much more code than I'm willing to deal with.
• Construct 3 and Stencyl are very easy to get up and running, but costly if you don't want object limits.

When I was about to dig into Stencyl and Construct 3 tutorials on youtube, I found a bunch of videos talking about a newer open source/free engine. GDevelop 5. It basically seems like a free version of Construct 3/Stencyl, which actually allows you to use code if you really want to (JavaScript).

After reading through the tutorials, I realized it would be super simple to get this up and running once I understood the basics. I've put ~15 hours into learning it, and built the platformer game/demo as my learning process. I also jumped on the GDevelop 5 discord (linked here) and got a bunch of help from the fine folks there. For the art and audio resources, I pulled from opengameart.org and itch.io's free game asset sections.

Special thanks

As mentioned above, thanks to @zandravandra for inspiring me to finally give this a go.

Thanks to @sparky_buzzsaw for showing interest early on.

Thanks to @kiapurity for being my rad wife and being supportive and happy I was doing something creative for once.

Thanks to my testers Sion and Patchouli for their feedback.

Thanks to the GDevelop community for being open and welcoming on this stuff.