Hello guys, I'm Luife, developer of Peter the Giraffe.

I participated in #TuJuegoAJuicioJam, a gamejam organized by youtuber / video game developer Alva Majo. The theme of this jam was "Too long" and in two weeks I made Peter The Giraffe, a cute little adventure about the life of a giraffe in his city . So in this devlog I'm going to show you how I made the game step by step. 

To begin with, I used the Godot Engine, an engine that I started using about two months ago and was fascinated by it. I started to make a small prototype where I programmed the bases of a platform game.I added a small dialog system to be able to interact with some npc, which I will talk about later.

PROTOTYPE

 Then I started to make the graphics. I am a very bad artist, and since I wanted some very specific graphics, I had to make them myself and for that I had to make them simple, so I used Aseprite, a program to make pixelart, so I started to make the main character. 

Say hello to Peter, our protagonist.

Peter is made up of three parts: the head, the neck and the body. As the main mechanic I made you be able to stretch your neck, for this I used the godot region texture.

 After I drew the Peter's house, the city and another house for the end of the game 

For some parts of the city I used the texture of the godot region, both for the sidewalk, the power poles, also a small fence. 

I also drew some buildings, a small bus stop, a big tree and some other little details. For the background I created some buildings with simple shapes and shades of blue, and I made this one make a small parallax. 

To prevent the player from stretching his neck to infinity, I placed some electrical cables and I made a small interaction that Peter gets electrocuted, poor Peter. 

Finally I made the npc of the city which are all African animals. To avoid having to do frame-by-frame animations since I'm not an animator, I made the character does a little jumps, and, in my personal opinion, it makes it cuter. 

Now it was time to make the sound effects and for this I used Bfxr, a program to create retro sound effects and others I took them from the internet and to modify them I used audacity. I took the music from a page called looperman 

Super Clean Melody by djkhaledsson and Reminds my of  Ujico by Kojv 

 The main attraction of this game would be the interactions with the npc, so try to create some fun situations to keep the player hooked on the game. To avoid spoilers, I will not say anything more about this topic.

With all this already done, I had 90% of the game finished and now I needed to do the most difficult thing, POLISH THE GAME. This makes the difference between a rookie prototype and a well-made game. This does not require a specific guide on how to do it, but every detail counts. For example, that the character has a small smoke when walking, or that he blinks, that the tree has small leaves that fall, that the sounds in the game are in 3D, that is, the closer you are to the source of the sound, the more stop, that Elephart, a character in the game draws while doing missions, that the string of a small balloon that you have has physics, I make small cinematics, unexpected interactions, etc. It is quite a long process and a bit tedious perhaps, but I promise you that it makes your game make a difference. 

Due to lack of time, perhaps I could not delve into the dialogues of the npc and some other details, but I think that with that the process of how I did Peter The giraffe would be documented in a simple way. If you would like to know how I did something in a more technical way, you can leave me a comment and as far as I can, I will answer you. If you haven't tried it yet, what are you waiting for? 

Thank you for your time.