‘SERAPHIM PRINCIPIA’: my 1st Game Jam submission
Seraphim Principia
In just two weeks I’ve written over 300 lines of code, crafted dozens of pieces of art and music, and compiled it all together into my first Game Jam submission.
Seraphim Principia is a big name for a small game in which you, the disembodied hand of Sir Isaac Newton’s spirit, idle away your time in heaven by dropping objects from the sky and seeing how tall you can stack them.
This game jam, the Godot Wild Jam #49, is the latest in a 4-year long series of online hackathons where independent developers and designers gather to create a video game from scratch in the open-source Godot Engine. Usually these events last for a week, but participants in GWJ #49 were given an extra week to polish their projects following Godot v4’s surprise beta release.
A screenshot from the release build of Seraphim Principia on Windows.
I was very appreciative of the bonus time, seeing as this was my first-ever game jam submission, and the first project I would ever complete and publish in gdscript (Godot’s built-in programming language). Prior to my 2022 dive into programming, I hadn’t seriously coded anything since C# class in high school. I’m 30 now, so there was a lot of rust to shake off (and not Rust - I’ve been out of the game long enough that I have zero exposure that that particular language).
If you download Seraphim Principia, please remember to rate the game on itch.io to help the Jam organizers pick a winner!
Lessons learned from this jam:
-Understand what the capabilities are of your engine before you get knee-deep into it. I'm really enjoying the changes in GD4, but realizing too late that there's no HTML5 export support really threw me for a loop
-Planning on paper ahead of time helps me write cleaner code and choose more articulate variable names
-Backgrounds >>>> no backgrounds, visually
Skills gained:
-Greater understanding of how node instancing works and the values of a dynamic typing language -Comfortable connecting signals at runtime
-Artistic: mixing colors from a palette in a background, but using the same colors discretely in foreground sprites is a good way to differentiate the two layers while keeping some color consistency
