Best Laid Plans...

My nephew told me he entered a Godot Wild Jam last month and had me test the result. It seemed like a cool thing to do, so I decided I'd jump in on the fun as a surprise to him for the next one. Silly me.

The theme instantly conjured up stories of woods and witches in my mind, "Hansel and Gretel" at the forefront. I brainstormed it with my kids. We envisioned a maze game of sorts, trying to get away from the witch's hut. One of the wild cards mentioned changing control to a second character, which seemed like a fun mechanic and which would lend itself well to "Hansel and Gretel." But I like mixing and matching, so Gretel got nixed and Little Red Riding took her place. Besides..."Hansel and Hood" has a much better alliterative ring to it.

Having absolutely no prior experience creating a game or using Godot, "Littles Hansel and Hood" started out much more elaborate than it ended up. I had imagined a sort of reverse "Pac-Man" where the goal would be to lay pieces of bread (rather than picking up the dots) from the witch's hut to home or Grandma's house or something. You would only be allowed a certain amount of bread pieces, so finding the shortest path was part of the challenge. Hansel would lay the bread and Hood would pick up the pieces that needed to be repurposed elsewhere. There was also a wolf character that was supposed to patrol for the youths and create a loss condition. I even had a theme song written for pump organ. Unfortunately, due to intense and lengthy sessions of YouTube tutorials and discussion boards (figuring out the Godot interface and coding with gdscript for the first time) combined with roughly a week deadline, the bread, the wolf, and theme song all had to be abandoned. I even briefly thought about a procedurally generated maze for levels with different replayability, character animations and sound effects, a timer, and a high score board for fastest times, but since those other elements didn't make the cut, these certainly didn't either. So, what we have now is...just a maze. The only really cool thing I was able to actually do was use my kids' artwork for the game.

Perhaps, once I've recovered from lack of sleep, I'll return to add those wished-for elements. It might actually turn out to be moderately fun at that point.