One Night Devlog

12/5/25 first day!
today i thought about what 'journey home' means to me personally. my fond memories of going home are late night journeys in the car, playing my gameboy until it ran out of battery and having to find other ways to entertain myself. i wanted to take that nostalgic feeling and make it into a game. i decided on the name 'one night' with the full title being "one night during your childhood your parents carried you to your bed from the car after a long journey and you had no idea this would be the last time it would ever happen" because i love that bittersweet nostalgia. i have a rough idea of the ending scene, which would be sounds of getting carried to bed with closed captions, and an end screen of a childhood bedroom.

13/5/25
because i have little to no experience coding i decided to follow a tutorial. i watched a video by Coding With Russ on how to make Dino Run in Godot, because i thought it would be a good jumping off point to make the game i imagined. using my own images became an issue when i ran into problems because of differing file names, dimensions and things I wanted to add or take away from the game. despite getting a lot of help from Vurj and learning a lot, by the end of the night i decided to start my project again and use the same assets as in the video. i plan to change them once i'm done so at least i'll have more knowledge by then and may find it easier to fix any problems.

14/5/25
i followed the tutorial exactly and had a LOT less issues. if you're new to game dev i highly recommend not changing anything while following a tutorial.

15/5/25
i finished off the last of the tutorial and got really stuck with the play button. now i have to figure out how to translate my idea onto this template. im struggling with the idea of changing heights because the objects spawn on the ground right now and i dont know how to change that. my first idea was different levels to run on, like jumping from the ground to a telephone pole, but i have NO idea how to make that work so i ended up painting a guardrail. i spent a while making the car window frame but aseprite doesn't have the ability to do what i want so i used krita to make it more painterly. i also changed the colour of the placement assets to see what the vibe of the game would be like.

- all the original assets from the tutorial with my car frame on top. this is where i started to get excited that my idea would actually work

- here you can see a leftover enemy from the tutorial and my guardrails not lining up properly. i did not understand how the code worked so i changed the spacing 1 number at a time until it lined up except it lined up on a different part of the guard rail so i had to repeat each section of the rail image instead of having the whole of it be uniquely painted. then it turned out that the number i was changing was the amount of guard rails not how often they spawn :) no of course im not still frustrated by that :))

18/5/25
today i drew a background and cleaned up the rail. i made custom leaf stamps in aseprite for the bushes. im proud of the sky, it's accurate even down to the brightness of stars and you can even find constellations - i tried to make them accurate to how i would see them on my car rides home from my childhood but i am a beginner astronomer so if i made a mistake please tell me! 

i added a jump spin with godots animation which made it feel way more fun and 'dynamic'

i looked for copyright free music but found so much AI slop that i felt nervous about even using any free music. i decided to go for atmospheric sounds instead. 

i also ended up recolouring the sprite. i did plan on making my own character but i got too attached to the dinosaur and didn't want to delete them..

today was the first time it really felt like the game was actually coming together :3

- my dino recolour. if you can figure out what character it's based off please tell me!! :D

- my parallax background made in aseprite. please ignore the fact that the telephone pole perspective doesnt make sense 

19/5/25 half way!

i spent a long time trying to fix the ground bug, it wouldn't scroll properly and the image kept jumping. i cleaned up the bushes and removed the objects from the tutorial, but i had to hide them instead of actually removing them because somehow the whole game breaks if i remove the invisible load bearing barrel lol. 

- my invisible load bearing barrels and a cool CRT filter i was trying out

20/5/25
today i drew a logo/title screen. originally i had a moon in it which i do prefer the look of, but because the menu screen scrolls even before you play, there would have been a double moon on the screen which looked odd. i really wanted the scrolling title screen so it would look good to people walking past. i also really wanted the surprise of the moon coming out from behind the clouds.
i got together some sound effects for the ending and i made an alphabet so i could write some text, including the play and restart button. i didn't make it into an actual font or anything, i just selected and dragged each individual letter. the rest of the day was just bug fixing. i worked on the text for the subtitles - looked up guidelines for closed captions because it was important to me to make the game accessible for people who are D/deaf or have hearing impairments. as with many accessibility accommodations, this will also help abled people if the surroundings are noisy during the showcase of the games. I cleaned up the car frame and added a shake to it. i uploaded my game onto itch and it crashed on startup because i wrote a folder name with a lowercase letter.. im glad i tested it on itch way before the deadline so i didnt have to fix things in a panic.




- i reused the cloud image for the logo because im lazy efficient

21/5/25
i collected some sounds and put them together to make the ending scene. ive never used audacity before and was struggling with getting little pops every time i stitched sounds together. i found a 10 year old youtube comment that told me to how to use the repair feature, so thank you MinecrafterJCB1. it was pretty fun to imagine the ending and try to match up the sounds to it. it was at this point i decided to scrap the idea for the bedroom scene at the end.

25/5/25 last day!
i went to comic con over the weekend so had a few days where i couldnt work on the game. on the last day of the jam some friends playtested the game and i got their input on how long the game should be before the cutscene triggers. i made it quite a bit shorter because they are gamers and i wanted it to be more accessible to the general public, lol. the ending scene was made using godots animation feature.

26/5/25 thoughts! 
i really regretted using the tutorial i did, and needed to ask for a lot of help. i think for future game jams i will follow a tutorial directly without changing anything, rather than thinking of an idea first and trying to find a specific tutorial that will work as a base. i think the issue is when you're so new, you don't know what tutorials are good and which ones arent until you try them (and even then its not obvious until someone points it out) so next time i'll just go for a super popular tutorial. i ran into a lot of trouble because the code felt VERY inflexible and impossible to expand upon. every single thing in the game is based off screen size and the size of the sprits and the ground, so i couldn't change a sprite by even one pixel without everything breaking!!! i really dont recommend altering a tutorial unless you have someone experienced to help you, and luckily i did. thank you vurj!!

i really enjoyed writing a devlog this time, it's nice to look back on and i really recommend other people do it!