Carl And Ca2l Are Unleashed Upon The World

2024-05-10

Yippee! The game is done, or so I've been told. Carl and Ca2l are ready to entertain a small number of people with their antics for approximately eight minutes, and all is good in the world. Be free, my children.

Right. So here's my main takeaways from this project thus far:

Spreadsheets are a very nice way to keep track of tasks for game design stuff. You can just list all your stuff ahead of time and mark it off when it's all done.
It's possible to complete a project in one's free time, even with major disruptions (like homework for actual classes) as long as the project is planned well enough. There's no way I could have finished it if I'd gone by vibes, but this way, I could drop back in where I left off by looking at my fun and cool spreadsheet.
Rewrite! I didn't like a lot of the dialogue the first time around so I just scrapped it and rewrote it, and now I like it. This process involved giving the characters some actual backgrounds. I know what these guys' majors are, and I suppose you can know, too. Carl is studying Robotics (a field which is sort of magical in this universe), Doug is studying Political Science, Ralph is studying Computer Science, and Bert is studying Biology.
Small projects are not small; scope can be difficult. I wanted this to be a ~20 hour project I could do over Fall Break. Fall. Break. This turned out to be, like, 90 hours of work when you count all the music and debugging and tweaking and playtesting and so on. Maybe it could have been shorter under different circumstances. Well, I understand more about the scope of a project like this for next time.
I don't like GameMaker anymore. She hurt me. </3 I don't like the idea of making my personal games in proprietary engines that can just, like, steal all my work from me -- evaporate all my effort. You guys remember the Unity fiasco? Yeah. That's my (vegan btw) beef with proprietary stuff. So I'll be moving onto FOSS-ier pastures with Godot for my next gamer move.

At this point, I would really love feedback. Any feedback. Even mean feedback. I can take it -- I'm a featherless biped, unlike Bert, who is actually a biped with feathers. Presumably. He doesn't actually have a sprite with legs in the game, so I guess there's no way to know for sure if he's bipedal or not.

I originally posted this to Itch shortly after I completed Carl The Copycat. Carl and Ca2l are a fun duo to draw, so they have persisted in my art even after the game's release (which is what all of those images are).