PLEASE START US OFF BY INTRODUCING YOURSELF:
Hi! I’m Radnyx. I make games. 10 years ago I taught myself programming on the internet. I was pretty crusty at it, but it shaped up after taking classes and a few software jobs. Many, many game jams and unfinished projects later, I released my first complete game: Frog Corral.
I also like to draw and make music. I tend to take obsessive deep dives into how art is made, so if you want to talk about music theory, color theory, or algorithms, hit me up!
TELL US ABOUT LIL GUYS.
I’m making a game about lil guys building castles and fighting monsters. Think of Pikmin with base building. You start with a handful of these chalky lil guys that look like candy. You command them to dig, build, and make more lil guys. Enemies come in and try to take the crown from your king, and you have big silly battles to ward them off.
It wasn’t a game originally. It started as a little battle royale simulation I hacked together in a weekend. I just put a hundred lil guys on the screen and told them to fight each other. This is when I drew and animated the characters, so the goofy, colorful vibe was set in from the beginning.
After watching them basically just beat the crap out of each other, I thought it’d be fun to control them like an RTS. From there, other ideas followed pretty naturally. Like, how do you make more lil guys? What if you could build stuff? And so on.
HOW HAS THE DEVELOPMENT JOURNEY BEEN
Development has been fun! It was a bumpy ride to start, but things are smoothing out. I started making the game in Godot 3 and coding in GDScript. It was a good choice. Godot has everything you need to make 2D games. It was easy to add simple logic and visual effects.
After a couple months I put together a decent prototype. It had castle building, a few enemies, and a boss. All in all a basic game loop. I shared a demo with people and got a lot of really good feedback. While the game was promising, it was clear I needed to scrap some tech and start fresh.
WHICH GAME ENGINE DID YOU CHOOSE AND WHY?
So I ported the project to Godot 4 and started using C#. I liked GDScript, but there were just too many things I missed from fully fledged programming languages. C# also gave me more control of the memory and performance, which became relevant as I made the world bigger and added more characters.
Hundreds of lil guys running around really started to push the engine. I had to swap out Godot’s built-in solutions for things like pathfinding and collision detection with my own code. Not that it was better, it was just more specialized to my needs.
WHAT'S BEEN YOUR BIGGEST DEVELOPMENT HURDLE SO FAR?
My biggest struggle has been designing controls that are easy to learn while giving the player a lot of control. I experimented with many different control schemes. My original approach forced players to micromanage everything. For example, to move resources, players had to manually select a group of lil guys, select items on the ground, and choose a place to drop them off. To actually build stuff with those resources was even more complicated. It was clear that the game needed more automation.
So I transitioned from traditional RTS gameplay toward a playstyle that moreso resembles colony simulators and tower defense games. This meant centering the controls around what the player cares about. In this case, it was mining, building, and defending. Players should be able to strategize in these terms while the lil guys do all the dirty work.
Now, if you want to dig for resources, click the resources. If you want to build a castle, place down blueprints wherever you want. The lil guys will figure it out. And of course, if need be, you can select your lil guys and force them to complete a certain task. Players responded to these changes really well.
ADVICE FOR FELLOW DEVS?
A lesson I learned from this project is: Don’t be afraid to keep it simple. I overcomplicated the controls in the beginning because I thought players would get bored if they didn’t have a million things to do. It ended up being a very confusing experience.
When I simplified the controls, I was surprised to see players having fun with such an early version of the game. Even though there wasn’t much to do, they made challenges for themselves and told their own stories. So don’t underestimate your players. It’s not just the controls that make a game fun, it’s also the environment you put the player in.
ANY FINAL THOUGHTS?
If you’re making games, or any form of art really, don’t forget to mess around and have fun. This game wouldn’t have existed unless I spent a weekend hacking together a silly idea.
For the longest time I felt like I was waiting for that one golden idea to come to me, but it really doesn’t work like that. You just have to start with something, and your instincts will kick in. It doesn’t matter if it’s a good idea or a bad idea, every time you sit down to work on it, you make it better and better.
You can be working on that one dream game, or a goofy side project, but as long as you’re making games, you’re a game developer.
-Radnyx
❤️
