Retrofitter

Development:

During the lead-up to the Athena Jam, I had already developed an idea I wanted to go ahead with for this project, which would be relatively easy to make, allowing me to enter the competition and be able to balance the remaining tasks of my current assignments. I had high hopes for this Jam, and was really looking forward to creating something unique that other teams wouldn’t have thought to create.

During one of my lectures prior to the Jam, my lecturer had suggested that it was a fun experience for students to create a clicker game at some point, and so I took this to be the opportunity for me to create this style of game. With the actual theme not to be announced till the opening event, I had to only hope that the theme would be able to fit with my idea.

Eventually, when we finally knew the theme of “Retrofit”, everyone was confused by what that really meant. Retrofit is essentially fitting something with new or modified parts, which originally stumped me as to what I could actually do with this theme. Had the theme been something straightforward like “Mask”, I would have simply created a mask clicker and made it so you upgraded your mask the more you click. However, after some quick thinking, I settled on making it so that you collect computer chips and could purchase new hardware to progressively earn more and more.

Being such a simple concept, and also having an idea myself, I chose to work solo on this project, as well as wanting to work in Godot again. The main area I wanted to improve with this project was understanding how a save system would work, especially considering how this was an idle clicker game. With my main developments focusing on the save functionality, creating that feature was actually really straightforward. With all the details being saved to a generated text document, my only real concern was forgetting to save a specific item to the save manager. However, after spending so much time setting up the different pieces of data that needed to be saved, it became very easy to remember to add each element to the save script.

Alternatively, my priority was making the actual clicker itself, and the slow increase in the number of clicks. This was a balance that I knew I had to get right: increase the amount generated over time too much, then it feels too broken; increase the amount earned per click too much, and the balancing would be off again. I focused a lot on making sure that it felt just right, and personally, I think I achieved this perfectly. I wanted the main task to be actually clicking, not relying on the accumulation of chips over time, so upgrading the mine speed does produce more, but that’s the whole point of the game.

I also took some time to create a lot of the images myself, using Photoshop to create the background and buttons. Especially since The Mask Platformer used art assets from a free website, I wanted to let some of my creativity free and provide myself with the appropriate and on-theme assets. I also took graphic design back in secondary school, and although we used the unavailable tools of Adobe Fireworks at the time, eventually having learned my way around Photoshop in college, I was confident that I could make my own assets.

I also once again used SilentWolf to create a global leaderboard of top scores. I loved the option to showcase the time it took to complete a level in The Mask Platformer, so a game where you can infinitely increase your score needed the inclusion of a leaderboard. My favourite part about releasing this game was slowly seeing the high score change and grow over time, and knowing that people were genuinely playing the game for long periods of time to attempt to place in the top places was really fun to see.

Eventually, I did reach a satisfactory point with this project where I felt like I had nothing more to add. I ended up finishing a whole day early, but with how simple and straightforward the game was, I didn’t mind having this extra time from my game.