Gio and the Star

The Story

Gio and the Star was the start of my game developing journey and the first videogame I ever made. It is a platformer game made using the Godot game engine and where I started learning GDScript. While it was a learning experience for me, there was still a lot of care and attention to detail that went into this project. The world I created was meant to draw players into a whimsical realm where every corner is adorned with an irresistible dose of cuteness. Vibrant colors, adorable characters, and quirky sound effects were used to present an aesthetically pleasing environment and playful atmosphere to keep players immersed.

One thing to note was the choice of sound effect and game over screen when the player loses. I decided on a taunt theme to make players want to play again by offering more drive to win.

Enemies

The mushroom bum enemy theme was kept consistent throughout the game and included at different levels of difficulty. While the orange caps simply walked side to side and the spike balls repeatedly slid from point A to point B back to point A using a tween for smoothness, the blue caps presented a more difficult enemy to implement as they moved by jumping in random directions. I created them using a 2D kinematic body that handled gravity. A timer was attached and once it timed out it would apply an upward velocity, or “jump”, then restart. I also created a random number generator that chose between 2 numbers which represented the random direction the enemy would move next. To prevent it from jumping out of bounds, a raycast object was used to detect how close it was to the edge. The spotted red cap was the boss enemy that appears following a cut scene. Many features were included in this enemy such as spawning other enemies, a smog attack made using an area that would send off signals when the player entered it, and different states of vulnerability/invulnerability.