Coming to Terms with A Mid Project

At long last, I consider the Goobert Climb project to be complete, even if it is nowhere near perfect or bug-free. 

 After many breaks, poorly optimized features, straight up bad ideas, and countless hours, I have finally released a once-mobile game as a browser-only game. What happened?

Many things. The least of which was scope creep. I consider myself to still be a beginner developer, so this was my first real lesson involving scope creep. The core gameplay loop of Goobert Climb was basically finished in February 2024 and was called Super Climb. It was a fine-enough platformer game, but I wanted to make it more than a simple opportunity to learn some new development skills and tricks. I wanted to make a legitimately great game with complex systems and features interacting with each other - which leads me to my first major issue of Monetization features that I ran into.

I had significant difficulties implementing the Godot Google Play Store and AdMob plugins to my game. I have greatly enjoyed my time using the Godot engine and am pleased with its performance on weaker systems, but adding more obscure features to an open-source engine that constantly updates meant that I had to do lots of research and debugging to get my monetization features in (that didn't even make it to production!)

Another issue that I had was with the newly-implemented testing requirements that the Google Play Console requires for new users. I barely missed the account creation date cutoff, so I had to have 20 testers install my app for 14 days before I could apply for production. Obviously, being in the US as a novice developer, I didn't really have many organic testers to reach out to. So, after spending so much time learning how to navigate the Google Play Console and its secondary services, I ran out of luck here. 

It's probably for the best though, because the game that I was about to release was going to be a genuine stain on the Play Store, and that's saying something.

The other issue I had was with the life-sim parts of the game I implemented. See, I re-named the game to Goobert Climb to focus on this cute little ball named Goobert that you have to take care of. You had to grow crops to feed him and make him happy, and then he would produce goo that you could sell for money. This didn't make much sense at all with the platforming elements I had made, and a real-time farming sim took a long time for me to implement successfully. So basically, I kinda wasted my time doing things that watered down my product and ultimately ended up removing all of it.

So ultimately, the project that I am releasing for free is basically Super Climb haha. The controls aren't great, the art direction is odd, and it's pretty basic and buggy, but that's just how things go sometimes. Working on this project, though, has taught me so much about development and the lessons I've learned through it have transferred over to other projects (including a live Google Play Store game woo) so I can't be too annoyed with the mistakes made.

Normally, I don't do blog posts of any kind but I think the end of Goobert was a special occasion lol.

Here's to what's next,

EarnWizard