You can find the download for the project in the ‘Projects’ page on this site or by clicking this link, give it a try and let me know what you think!
Beacon started life as a Global Game Jam project that I worked with a group of friends on, you can find that link here.
The beginning
Ever since that project, Beacon became my sort of “Hello World” game when starting to learn a new game engine. The scope itself is simple yet teaches a lot with lighting, controls, collision, and a bunch of other core skills that can be expanded on in any sort of way. For fun I shared a prototype with a friend I threw together one weekend when really trying to learn Godot and the feedback was far more positive than I expected. From there I decided, yeah I will turn this into a full game.
This brings us to the now, over the course of the year (January 2025 - August 2025) I have been working on the game. I set out with one goal in mind, I need to learn to do everything. I don’t need to do it well but I should have an understanding of how each piece works.
Coding
This was the first step on the journey, I already had a prototype developed so it was time to rip it apart and start fresh. With a fresh project in front of me I started with the only logical thing I could think of, the settings. Now of course I didn’t think to pull some test sounds or music to make sure how I set up the audio bus, testing fullscreen / windowed toggle didn’t really work in debug mode but I called it feature complete (is this what everyone refers to as ‘vibe coding’?)
From there I drew some cubes to the screen and started getting a more organized project from the original prototype developed.
I truthfully don’t have too many screenshots as I didn’t really think I would be continuing the project or even writing about it but don’t worry dear reader I will get better for future dev logs (maybe)
Art
This was step 2 and one of the longest parts of my journey. Obviously by looking at the screenshots I am by no means an artist but I think I capture the theme that I was trying to convey. A robot jumping in the darkness.
Art started off with a concept drawing in Asperite. I played around with different shapes of legs, body, heads, etc… until I finally landed on the concept I liked
on a real note, while I criticize my art and animations heavily, I am proud with what I was able to get out. It got my point across and allowed me to replace my cubes with an actual piece of art and allowed me to build out an animation controller to help automate animations.
Sound & Music
I am grouping these together because Music is one line, I quit.
I thought art and animation was hard, well at least I got something together for those, music, well no matter how long I stared at reaper and watched tutorials, I couldn’t figure it out. In the end I hummed into a mic, added some bass, reverb, echo and called it a day.
Sound on the otherhand was a bit more successful in the sense that I got sound in and was able to build the sound controller (yes its the same principle as the animation controller). I found sound to be one of the second favourite things to work on, it was really cool to hear me hitting things together turn into a different sound all together.
The release
I had a huge burst of energy one day in August, I went in with the goal of “lets just draw the level on paper”. Well it didn’t last that way, shortly after finishing the drawing I started to build it in Godot, I then play tested and enjoyed it so I made the decision to go ahead and make the build. By 2am I was finally sharing my creation on itch and with my friends to get them to play test.
Summary
This has been a very brief year at a glance for Beacon, and the process of everything I have been learning on my game dev journey. While looking back I have learned a ton already there is still way more for me to jump into and continue growing as a dev. I cannot wait to continue progressing on this project and continue to make progress.
Thank you for reading and see you in the next one!