u/Dobert_dev

WOWOWOOWOWOWOOWOWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW

its been SOOOOOO LONGGGGGG and FINALLY i'm here... and i'm just beginning. Wow, what a WILD JOURNEY! Godot and many other programs have helped me excell in a stupidly short ammount of time. 1.5 years ago I knew ZERO things about coding, meshes, texturing, games, the fact that you have to tell the computer to do every little tiny thing.

I have a wild, wild youtube series covering the development of this game coming, because this is literally just the beginning. I've spent about a year, handling the modularity of the game to make way for my intense asset generation. I literally just made 42 unique base stat items, all something special, all unique 3dmesh/2dclip art. I FRIGGEN LOVE physical menus!!!

Anyway, heres my game. its been a long journey, check out the steam page!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4907380/TAKEDOWN_16/

Im basically making risk of rain on wheels

And also yes - my marketing material REALLY sucks, I spent 2 days on it and I just suck at that stuff. gonna have to pay someone to do that stuff lol.

WISHING THE GODOT COMMUNITY ALL THE BEST AND NEVER GIVE UP YOUR DREAMS!!!!!

BEST!!!
NMM STUDIOS!

So, if you have a little experience in game dev and making meshes - i'd try out WAFER by sparseal, this has helped me go from 0 to 90 in texture painting. I use blender to do the meshes, and assign texture properties (like glass, metallic surface blah blah) then I export it into godot and I've got to say this is STUPIDLY easy lol. (atleast if you know blender somewhat, the concept of uv unwrapping, and a little bit of godot)

Also, I hope you guys like my models :) WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF TAKEDOWN 16!

(Previous post didnt have the gifs in it so i'm trying again)
(After realizing I can only have one video, whatever, lol, you can look at my previous posts to get other action shots)

HI ALL!

My names Rob, I'm a solo dev at No More Microtransactions studios (yes I made that up)

I just want to share my crazy, insanely fast development cycle, holy crap I can finally look back at all the hard work story.

TL:DR TAKEDOWN 16 - risk of rain on wheels - GET TF READY, making a dev log soon. I ❤️ GODOT!

If you want to following along for development and my assets making and get behind the scene look, Join T16's DISCORD! (Warning, its very new lol, I just made it today, And I suck at marketing)

https://discord.gg/pUKcQjst

It all started the end of November of 2024, I ran a general contracting business (I started this with 1500$ and a 1998 camry) by this point in time I was reaching 3 years in business. Making (to what I considered) a crap load of money, I was no longer living pay check to pay check for the first time in my life at age 31 (life sucks). I've always been a hard worker, even before my business. But I started my business because I feel like no one could treat me correctly. I work and pour my soul into anything I care about. So I started my handymans business and that grew into what I think was the fastest growing fencing company in Charleston (at the time) 50% of my business was word of mouth alone. It wasnt uncommon for me to do the fence next door. I ran my business like most small business owners dont. Once they make a sale, you never see them again. I was boots on the ground every single day. 12-14 hours a day, 1-2 days off a months, maybe. One time I painted for 26 straight hours. Money was pouring in, and at the same time my soul was leaving too.

I don't regret working as hard as I did, but I feel as if - If I didn't work as hard as I did for everyone else, that wouldnt've happened that way. I burnt myself out after 3 years. I think the lesson here is, find a balance and don't let people just take advantage of you because you are a people pleaser.

After November 2024, my fiance and I decided that - Maybe its best for me to take a reset on life and just... stop working. So I did, I gave up my phone, bank account, facebook, tictok, all that stuff. It was... really transitional and kinda hard at first but holy %!#$ NO ONE NEEDS THAT STUFF. Just makes you worry, unhappy, I mean obviously everyone needs money but the phone, facebook, and tictok have made me revaluate what the hell I even got from that stuff anyway.

NOW finally to the game part lol.

I'm not exactly sure what took me so long from then and about june of last year, I decided that I was tired of being the wife (essentially) and my soul needs purpose, so ... I downloaded

Roblox Studio ..... lol....

I must say, that its not as anywhere easy as it says it is. The networking treshholds the "free" servers give you, yah dude I didn't spend the last 5 years in networking, i have 0 coding experience.

That didn't get me very far but I am proud I left the roblox community with a 60% click to play ratio. I KNOW WHAT THE KIDDOS WANT (kidding).

I essentially copied the "troll tower" model, but putting my own spin on it, sometimes the troller would be trolled by getting ejected hard from a platform switch (lol)

The server would get about 30-50 people on it and crash, this is about after 3 months of me figuring out how to build stuff in roblox and put up leader boards, have a place for people to buy stuff, and save it. LOADS of backend stuff I wasn't ready for.

that flopped hard, but visually it was actually better then most of the shit towers on that platform.

Also the company is led by people who seem to be for child predators (or not care that much) ever since I left, I'm glad they've gotten the exposure they need. NO PLATFORM SHOULD SUPPORT ANY PREDATOR ANYTHING!!!! (They don't support it, but their lack of defense around it and money allocated around it is enough to point a finger at, look at the recent story with one of their big streamers getting banned for... catching predators? working with local law enforcement to ACTUALLY catch people trying to... do weird stuff with KIDS... Anyway, rant over)

around august of last year and the same day I gave up on Roblox because I couldn't even put my heart in it. The platform is just awful. But, it is what it is.

I decided that, since getting bitten with not knowing any networking stuff. I decided to make a game 100% local.

THIS is where I found Godot, and it all really really started here. When I started here, I was listening to the "make small games!" feeling that you fall into as a beginner. Which works, but i'd say you only need to make 3-5 small games before committing to something you can ship.

Before I made anything myself I had LOADS of video and tutorials I did, I did brakeys "make your own game in 2 hours" and also that one guy who has the 10 hour long video on "The definitied godot 4 beginner tutorial" and a bunch of other videos.

It took me WEEKS but this is all I did, I didn't do anything creative myself, I haven't even touched blender at this point. I completed all of those tutorials, and the decided to make my first prototype!

DARK ARCHERS is a spinoff of strongholds crusaders ability to shove 500 archers in a single little tiny tower, the goal here was to create a very simple small game. I didn't know how to art at all so I got AI to generate me some stuff. Well, using AI for art, espeically ALL of your art is just not gonna work lmao. Maybe it does for some, but that just was a terrible, hopeless, experience from an artistic standpoint. Nothing looked cohesive. My goal was a parralax system where its 2d, but they move in a 3d like world where an endless horde comes from the horizion, and you just have to defend your tower of a crazy ammount of archers.

I didn't even complete this lol, and its totally doable in like a few days.

I don't know what made me quickly move on to my next project / idea but it was called Gravity Tower and - This is my first serious move towards like, understanding backend development, archetecture wtf is a state machine and singletons. I actually grinded on this mega hard, downloading aesprite, learning pixel art (I still had AI generate the art, but by this time, I was able to manipulate it and turn it into my own thing, also this is and always is only for iteration, not for sales). I had this idea to turn breakout and modernize it. But like REALLY modernize it... extended bumpers are actually heroes you can pick up in the shop, and they all do something special. I had a character named "sloppy joe" that actually creates a gap in your bumper. as you progress though the stages the map opens up, it becomes wider meaning you have less space to hit that ball back. I had a "unlimited ball configuation" possibility. You could combine any ball with any other ball. i mean you can do anything with code, but I guess at this moment without me realizing it - I was learning backend architecture. Inheritence, class names, signals, all that stuff kinda started to make sense with this project.

Too bad BALL X PIT was about to release and I had just spent 100's of hours without not doing enough deep research. Yah, on paper it %!#$ing shattered me. This was one of the hardest lessons i've learned in development. Almost a 1:1 identical copy on the backend. Of course, I didn't have the money for the graphical fidelity (devolver always has a mega unique style) theres NO WAY I would stand any chance against the giant.

So, I literally gave up, I concluded that - I SHOULD NOT put anymore effort into creating gravity tower, someone beat me to the punch, and by a long shot.

Even worse, I saw most my friends, who don't comprehend development are all playing it loving it. There is some part of a human that, I know they don't know but %!#@ that just sucked dude. Watching what could've been if I was first, and with more experience.

I don't think it was more then a week before I decided to come up with my next idea and I couldn't help but notice... To all you studios out there. Stop making Vampire clones, just stop, stoppppppp doingggg THAATTTTTTT.

Especially top down, asset reusing, AI generated art, thrown together garabge. Stop it!

Enter TAKEDOWN 16 - A ROGUE GROUP OF 16 VIGILANTES set to stop the unstoppable control of MEGACORPS (uncontrollable) AI! (MEGACORP is a real company so I gotta change that, lmao)

I'm literally making risk of rain on wheels, with a twisted metal / vigilante 8 setting.

I just finally, since November, am able to pick 1 of 4 characters that are different and have distinct visual and back end qualities. Progress through all of the levels, enter a shop where I need to buy stuff and everything be in the spot it was when I come back out. Each level has a boss, theres 4 stages, when you beat the boss you progress to the next level. This is almost identical to risk of rain but with a completely different coat of paint but just as deep. Meta progression, I mean holy crap I just laid the foundation and now I can finally asset grind (devs understand this). I've been so so so waiting for this moment because this is the FUN part (IMO). going to start my development youtube/tiktoc series soon. I cannot believe how I wear so many hats now. Literally, I don't outsource anything and I do all of my own art now. Wafer is an amazing texturing program and blender is just a BEAST. This is the part where I can just make an astral train boss in one day, drop it into godot, mess with stuff in the inspector and have it just WORK with my ecosystem. YAYYY INHERITANCE AND BASE STUFF!

I hope this is encouraging for ANYONE looking to try Godot, you just gotta start. It'll come, don't be scared! embrace the hard! :D

BESTEST EXTRA MOST BEST REGARDS TO THE GODOT COMMUNITY FOR ALLOWING ME TO DO THIS!

I am standing on the shoulders of giants!!!!!