Hey gang! Been a while, for a good reason: I’ve participated in the Indie Fighting Game Jam, as a team lead for a 14 person group! It’s a month long game jam, and there were a total of 60 games submitted. Congrats to everyone!

Our game is called Void Fury! We ended up using the currently available version of Castagne, so you may consider it the Godot 3 version’s swan song.

The game has some cool mechanics and some very nice visuals, thanks to the whole team pitching in! It uses a lot of cutting edge rendering techniques, and a lot of Castagne’s flexibility in workflows.

Something that the jam revealed, is that there’s a big gap between how I view and use Castagne, and how the community views and uses Castagne. My approach of Castagne has always been a very expert-focused engine, which was able to reveal its strength in our workflows as it was able to handle everybody pitching in pretty seamlessly. However, this has not been the case with many of the other teams, from what I’ve seen in the community. I think I’ve identified the missing piece, which is that there’s no mental framework really explained at indie / hobbyist level that you kinda end up learning ad hoc when working in the industry.

This has given me some new insights into the design of the new version. I believe my direction is still the correct one, but I am seeing that I’ve been too freeform in my explanations and preferred workflow. Therefore, a way to make Castagne more accessible to all might simply be to hold users’ hands a lot more through many steps, in an even bigger fashion than I envisionned. Castagne has always been pretty contained by design, but I might have to expand on the whole process, as many of the issues people have are at those edges - where you must understand a bit of Godot for example. It’s not possible to cover everything however, and much design time will have to be taken. I think this is one of the cases where the community should step in, and we should discuss on how to improve those aspects and do that work.

Congrats to the other 4 teams using Castagne! Please contact me with your feedback / postmortem on your project, my perspective is only one of many! Also we need to put your games on the roster.

In miscellaneous news: the forum is down because a maintenance by my provider revealed a flaw in the config, and I didn’t have time to fix it. I’ll try to bring it back up in the next couple days!