I remade Forward in Godot!

As some of you may know, indie game dev superstar and dice enthusiast Terry Cavanagh has run a game jam this weekend titled "Stop Waiting for Godot" - the goal was for a bunch of people to get together and learn how to use the engine, or improve their knowledge thereof. I've been a Godot user for a couple months already (though I still consider myself a baby programmer), so I decided to take this opportunity to remake Forward and hopefully fix some of its platforming jank along the way.

I was initially (and still am!) very proud of Forward's narrative and music. I think Dragons did a fantastic job with the game's visuals too, but the original version suffered a massive drawback : it was clunky as hell. The collisions were weird and misplaced, the character bounced weirdly and navigating through the levels felt very unclear and wonky. I set myself a mission to get rid of all of that nonsense and turn Forward into a platforming experience for the ages.

Did I succeed?

...meh. Not really.

It turned out that the main problem with Forward was its initial design : as I realized over the course of the jam, the very *way* I had initially shaped it and the core mechanic I had given it were instrumental to its shoddy-ness. Being forced to constantly move forward until you've spawned all the platforms is...not very interesting. Back then, I mostly thought of it as an excuse to progress the text...well, forward. But this week, I found myself in an awkward situation because of it : I couldn't entirely remove that design, or else I would literally be making a different game...but I couldn't leave it "as is" without replicating the flaws of the original. The decisions I took to fix these issues were...retrospectively not amazing, but they took me in a learning journey that was very much worth the effort.

I decided to fix the game's wonky platforming by making the collisions larger and much more "permissive", as well as through making the character bounce by default upon touching platforms. Then, I decided that I would undertake my first "real" code challenge in Godot and create a global system to spawn corrupted platforms at random.
...eventually, I spent around five or six non-consecutive hours trying to wrangle the corrupted platforms into the game and half-succeeded, half-failed. I got *some* corrupted objects to spawn irregularly, but not on every level they were supposed to (despite the code being rigorously identical for each level), and I never really managed to control the randomness. I also realized in the process that the automatic bounce wasn't the funhouse I thought it was going to be, but a rather finnicky design gimmick. But at this point, I had invested too much effort into either feature to remake them - I would've had to rework large chunks of what was already done, which was more than I had bargained for.

At the end of the day, the game works-ish. It's definitely *less* janky than the original, and it saw some overall improvements that I'm very happy with. But I paid the price of not being more careful to follow Terry Cavanagh's excellent jam guideline : "Keep it simple". Hopefully I will carry that wisdom with me moving *forward*.

(the faintest of drum rolls is heard)