Godot: A Non-coder's Perspective

I am not a coder… I just know a bunch of them. 

This is Team Tearcell’s 4th game jam and the 3rd I’ve been involved with (Kobolds of OSHA, Debts and Pandamonium, Cosmic Canidae, and now Somnipathy). Each one of them has been made using the open source game engine, Godot. The strangest thing I’ve learned as a member of the dev team is that I can actually contribute quite a lot to a game jam despite having zero coding, artistic, or musical skill by way of the various built-in nodes and plugins people have designed for use in Godot.

What am I on about here?

Well, find yourself needing some basic animation but don’t know any artists like our situation with Kobolds of OSHA? No problem! The Animation Player node allows you to Key Frame pretty much any attribute. Allowing you to achieve rudimentary animation using .png’s that you drew using powerpoint!

But if you’re really lucky and have a couple of amazing artists like we did this time around, then it’s an extremely simple matter for them to draw up a sprite sheet and just hand it off to you to make the animation happen by modulating the H and V frames within the node. Freeing up the artists to continue generating the amazing assets that have drawn so many eyes to our project already!

As if the hard-coded functions of Godot weren’t powerful enough, the plugins that have been built for Godot are pretty out of this world as well. The one I want to highlight in this post is Dialogic, which is the plugin that we utilized for all of the pop up text and dialogue windows in Somnipathy.

Using this tool, myself and MTBVibe were able to generate Timelines that could be called upon in the code to trigger dialogue sequences (as pictured above) or interactable buttons (as pictured below

And we were able to do this with no coding know-how and minimal input from the lead coder. Especially since @Zaknafean could always just go into the timelines later and insert the Call Node or Emit Signal functions as needed once all of the Arguments and Functions were finalized.

Overall Godot and Dialogic have been fun to work with even as a coding outsider as well as intuitive to work with. I hope everyone is having fun with Somnipathy and are managing to cross enough thresholds to arrive at the point where things start to get… strange.

-HighVoltageCatfish (Zakahrum)