Aim for this learning session
- When I approach complex tasks I like to break them down
- For this project, I want to start the game by laying out the major scenes and then starting to flesh them out section by section
- I think I want to lay out the mini-games as
- To assess how my progress has gone, I want to use a technique I’ve read in the book ‘tiny experiments’ (Le Cunff, 2025) => drawing a table with 3 columns +ve / -ve and what next. Le Cunff encourages people to think about personal development in non-linear ways – as small experiments – and this focusing on small steps will hopefully help me learn about my process as well as my skill gaps
- It will also help me iterate my process as my skills develop
What did I do?
- I started with the Godot manual on their site, looking at the 2D functionality
- I read their intro to scripting languages: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/getting_started/step_by_step/scripting_languages.html#doc-scripting
- I watched this video on scenes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biYBttEW8Io
- Buttons: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgjGnlU43Fs
- I found that in general, even videos where the steps seemed simple, were difficult to follow
- The final video on buttons gave me the information that I was needing and I haven’t (yet) needed to do anything more complicated
- I have been able to integrate my rough storyboard images into Godot (as scene textures) and now each scene is clickable to the next scene
The outcome
Each scene leads to the next with mouse clicks and I have learnt how to add dialogue text.
ADD GIF OR VIMEO VIDEO
Reflecting on this making session
While I was making things, I was thinking carefully about what was working / not working and what was making feel stressed / productive. I have summarised these reflections below with learning that I am taking forward for the next making session.
| +ve | -ve | => |
| Eventually I found the right piece of information for what I needed to do | Quickly feeling overwhelmed with the complexity of the information | Continue taking a problems based approach to learning how to use the software – trying to learn everything in an abstract way is likely to overwhelm |
| I integrated my storyboard with the scenes and now it feels like I have a solid structure for the game to work into | Feeling like I am probably doing things the hard way | Chunking the tasks into smaller bits and leaving enough time for problems is the way to go |
| Taking breaks when feeling overwhelmed was helpful too | ||
References
Anne-Laure Le Cunff (2025). Tiny Experiments. Penguin.
