Northward Prototype

This was a demo I developed on my own at first and later as an independent study in late 2021 to mid 2022 using Godot 3.x. During the time it was an independent study I had a semi-rigid set of agreed upon objectives for specific points in the semester. I have worked on it more since, but this is a decent showcase of what I had at the end of the 2022 semester.

The art was primarily done by me, with some assistance from my friend Maddie with "Scissorito," some battle animations, and critique of some art I drew. The music is public domain.

Controls:

• Z to "go forward" in menus and interact with objects
• X to "go back"
• C to open pause menu
• Arrow keys to move
• 🦎Lizards to save/heal

Limitations:

• The web version used on this page is a little laggy, running natively doesn't produce the same results.
• Text box asterisk placement is glitchy.
• Transitions are sometimes broken. (partially web version, partially coding errors)
• None of the story that would occur in these areas was scripted, however that was out of scope for the agreed upon objectives at the time anyways.

If you can't find the roof:

The map design here when it comes to getting to the roof is a little confusing in retrospect. You need to go down to the bottom of the hallway map (go left, then down into the room with a table and chairs), to an area marked with an exit sign. Then try to go up, and walk "down" into the stairs on the upper platform going to the roof. In retrospect, this was a poor way to visually convey where you needed to walk.

What did you learn?/What would you do differently?

This was a very interesting learning experience for me. I had never self directed a project like this. The very largest thing I learned was to not implement your own text box handling system if an off the shelf one with acceptable terms can be modified to suit your needs. Godot Dialogue Manager existed at the time I was making this, and the current version was able to be set up to function nearly identical to the text box behavior in this demo within a few hours. I spent a very large sum of time sorting out text box behavior, and even in this version it has buggy asterisk placement.

I also learned a lot about setting scope and tech debt that can come from rushing. I would spend a lot of time on unfocused concepts that would have turned out better had I done the primary objectives first. There are a lot of features that are inaccessible in this demo, and many issues within this that caused tech debt I had to spend a lot of time reversing.

Another thing that I liked at the time but seems bad in retrospect is the specific design of the battle system.  I would go in a much different direction today.

I still work on this project occasionally, I rebooted development in Godot 4.x partially because of tech debt and partially due to the difficulty of porting projects from 3.x to 4.x. I hope one day to release some version of this game!