Show HN: The Jumping Jouster, a Godot game I made in my spare time

The horse animations took a long time, but also were a lot of fun to work on. I thought I was going to need to use a tool like Spine to create the animations, but the built-in AnimationPlayer node in Godot is really powerful, so I ended up using that for everything. For art, I have an iPad and a Mac, so I used Affinity Designer. I would draw on the iPad, save to iCloud, then load it up on the Mac for tweaking and export. GDScript is a breeze to use and the documentation is pretty good, so I rarely struggled to figure out how to do anything in code.

Ultimately, the most time-consuming part was probably building some systems that I never ended up using in the game. It wasn't "scope creep," per se... more that I never had determined scope to begin with. For example, in the game, there's only grass, but I actually created all of the art and a track generation system for multiple different ecosystems, only to realize that I had fallen down the Procgen rabbit hole and didn't need it for the gameplay.

The game itself actually doesn't use a physics engine. I use a few Vectors here and there to calculate acceleration. I've done some small projects that use physics, however, and it's very easy to incorporate them with Godot.

The export to HTML5 in Godot 3.1 is not great. I couldn't get it working with GLES2 (for reasons unknown to me) so I had to switch to GLES3, which largely limits to Chrome for in-browser play. It never was a goal to make it playable on the web. If I were to start over again, I'd include a loading screen so that the sound wouldn't get choppy at the start of the game and I would do a lot more incremental testing of the web exporting to make sure it worked well.

I use Unity at work. Godot is an absolute pleasure to use compared to Unity. It lacks bloat, has a great user community, it easy to get started with, and uses a scene hierarchy model that, to me, is more intuitive.