My dad introduced me to game dev when I was around seven years old. The first game I ever worked on was this game called Shoot The Eyeballs. The only thing that I helped with was making the art which was as bad as you probably think, and random ideas that I had. After that game was finished I took a break of about 3 years. But then I took a two courses in game development and made five games. After that I have been going strong in game development.
First Game Jam
On 9/8/2025 I entered my first game jam. At the time of writing this, it has been four days since I entered the game jam. The theme was anounced at 2:00 central time this morning. The theme was Bug Made Feature so I had to turn a bug into a feature. I decided on a platformer game where you are playing as a mech and you are going through levels. The core mechanics are: you can switch gravity, and you have a grappling hook. There is one more mechanic that I am thinking about implementing that is you can rotate the world around you and if you touch the ground you die. I don't know if I should do that or not. But the bugs that I have found and made features so far are: when you switch gravity you start to bounce on the ceiling, and if you switch gravity right before you hit the ceiling, you stick to it. The bouncing bug was a funny and really would be a really easy fix. I just forgot to check if the player was pressing jump while they were on the ceiling, which causes the player to always be jumping while on the ceiling. The bug where the player sticks to the ceiling I still have no idea what is causing it, but it is fun and pretty much a feature because you can cause it to happen 100% of the time.
Voidheart
I have been working on a new game called Voidheart. The name is probably not going to be the final name. This game is a metroidvania where your objective is to kill corrupt gods and absorb their powers. The reason I decided to make this is because I had recently beaten Hollow Knight and wanted to make a similar game. Part of the way throught making it, I thought it would be really fun to have heavy, powerful, and big weapons. The first few I thought of were a giant spear made of void, a massive laser, and a hammer that causes a shockwave. So far all I had done before today was basic movement, a variable jump, and a state machine. Today I have made a few test animations in krita, exported them as a sprite sheet to godot, got them working with the states, directional attacks, and a basic enemy. The movement was just the basic template that you get in Godot. The variable jump took me a while to figure out so here is how I did it. I originally tried a timer, and the longer you hold jump the farther you go, but that didn't work well at all. So I looked at some tutorials but all of them had the same approach as me until I found a good one. The way this person did the variable jump was if jump is pressed then add jump velocity to player velocity. But the way he made it variable is really smart. He added an if player velocity is less than 0, and inside of the if statement he put, if jump is released, then velocity.y gets halved. The way this workes is as long as the player has jumped, then as soon as the button is released then it halves the velocity as long as the player is still going up. Today I added some feedback for when you hit an enemy, and also made the attacking feel a little better, because it was hard to make the attack go the right direction.
I thought of the way spells and healing is going to work in Voidheart. The way I am going to implement the healing and spells is through runes. In the paragraph above, I stated that to progress you have to kill gods an absorb their power. When you start a game, you are going to have one rune. Every time you kill a god or demigod, you will get another rune that most likely will have a spell attached to it. I am planning on the player having ten runes in total but only five will have new spells. You will be able to get spell runes from gods and small runes and abilities from demigods and larger enemies. The way the runes are going to work is similar to Hollow Knight. Every time you hit an enemy you get a chunk of your main rune filled up. If you fill your big rune, you can either cast a spell or heal. If you fill your big rune, don't deplete it, and keep atacking an enemy, then another rune will begin to fill if you have one. Using this system, by the time you get to the final god, you will be very, very powerful. The final boss is going to be difficult even if you are max power. I will attach an image of the rune system as soon as I have one.
Voidheart Ability list
I am going to list the abilities that I have thought of here.
- Warp: Warp functions like the mothwing cloak from Hollow Knight. When it is activated, it will give you a short speed boost and let you faze through attacks.
- Abyssal Spear: The player will throw a massive spear made from pure void that explodes on contact with anything but the player.
- Godhammer: The player summons a greathammer made from light and slams it into the ground, causing a shockwave that travels forward. If used midair, the player shoots down toward the ground and slams the hammer down, causing a shockwave.
- Sword of the Fallen Hero: The player covers their sword in sharp void that doubles its size and damage for one attack.
- Time Stop: The player slows down time for everything but themselves for five seconds.
- Parry: The player parries the enemy and does a counter attack that does double damage.
- Beam of Radiance: The player fires a massive laser, doing massive damage, but in the process they consume two runes of power.
Microscope Stuff
About a week ago, we made a few microcosms for a biology experiment. Over the past few days, we have been looking at samples of the water of one. Today when we took our first sample, we found almost nothing alive. A little while after that we discovered that there was a residue of methylene blue stain left on the slide. Methylene blue is extremely toxic to microbes, so we took another sample. This time, we found a lot of different organisms. Some of the cooler looking ones were these strange ones that were segmented into four pieces. We didn't see any other species that we haven't seen, but we did see a cell dividing into another cell.