Graeme Borland

lol, when I first saw this and didn't realize what I was looking at yet, my first thought was genuinely "uh oh is that some kind of graphics bug? There's no blue level!"

YouTube video by Graeme Borland Vault of Stars (Jam Game Trailer)

✨🧙‍♀️ VAULT OF STARS 🧙‍♀️✨
Play: graebor.itch.io/vault-of-stars
#LDJam entry: ldjam.com/events/ludum...

Made in <72 hours for #LD58. It's a short puzzler with a mini-narrative based on the theme of "Collector". This was so fun to make, and I'm really proud of the result 😊
#gamedev #indiedev #godotengine

I can't wait to get more familiar with #godotengine and learn more. It's just a joy to work with, and iteration time is so fast - genuinely couldn't have pulled off this jam project without it! ✨

The fact that you can instantly run the current scene instead of the entire game also saves SO much time testing. I set things up so each puzzle/cutscene works on its own, and my main node just sequences them. Having no distinction between prefabs/scenes makes this so much cleaner!

Another example, the built-in tween system is SO GOOD, and the fact that you can easily tween any property and manage/group tweens with different targets and settings is BEAUTIFUL. Never before have I so enjoyed peppering in little tweens everywhere.

Working with Godot is making me realize how jaded I am from being exclusive to Unity for so long - when I find a built-in solution my instinct is to be skeptical and assume it'll be clunky or have lots of gotchas. But I'm finding 99% of the time in Godot things really are as simple as they seem.

I wanted to do parallax backgrounds and assumed it was going to be a hassle, but NO! Godot's built-in Camera2D and Parallax2D nodes work SO WELL just out of the box, and the settings actually make sense so getting your desired behaviour is so intuitive 🤯

There's so many little things in Godot that make life easier... For these mute buttons, they brighten based on mouse events from a Control node, and since you can set the modulate colour on the parent (or ANY 2D node) and it propagates through all its children (!!!) it was super clean to set up.

I hadn't really messed with #godotengine tool scripts yet, but I made a couple for this game, including this nifty one to quickly scale/position the elements of my dialog boxes based on one shared "size" value. Being able to make small tool scripts like this with only a few lines of code is so fun!

Photo of a page full of scribbly game design notes.

Photo of a page full of scribbly game design notes.

Can you tell I stayed up all night designing puzzles?? #LDJam

Screenshot of a character looking at three glowing lights before a colourful cloudscape.

I'm in for #LDJam / #LD58! Doing another project in #godotengine. It was a bit of a struggle to get some momentum started, but I'm enjoying where it's at now! I got sidetracked by art tinkering today, so it looks farther along than it is... Tomorrow's all about content/functionality! 👀

Yeah! Did a couple other small projects with it before this one and I’m sure I’ll do more - I really enjoy using it 😊

It was “10 seconds”! I believe something similar was reused as a theme years later but that was the OG one 😅

⭐ NXTWPN10 is out! ⭐
graebor.itch.io/nxtwpn10

This is a #godotengine remake of my first ever Ludum Dare entry, which was way back in 2013! I had a lot of fun re-creating and making some tweaks to this old idea to give it a bit of new life ✨
#gamedev #indiedev

Digital painting of two small figures standing before a glowing sphere that is sending energy up into the sky.

I've reached my 🎊5000th🎊 consecutive daily sketch! Every single day since January 1st, 2012, I've posted an original piece of art. You can find all of them on sketch.graemeborland.com ✨
#artsky #art #digitalart #conceptart #speedpaint

Digital painting of a spaceship flying low over colourful terrain.

Digital painting of a large spaceship lifting off in a foggy red environment.

Digital painting of two spaceships flying through colourful clouds.

Digital painting of a large spaceship flying close to the ground in the distance.

Ships and clouds ☁️🚀✨
#speedpaint #conceptart #art #illustration #digitalart

Pro tip: If you do the introductory #godotengine and #b3d tutorials at the same time, you'll unlock the "Godonut"

Sketch of the Day is going to hit Day 5000 in September, so to preemptively celebrate I'm getting a couple of its social media accounts back up and running. gbsketch.tumblr.com is back too - just not with every single daily, only my own site will have those.

It's still around! It just hasn't been updated in many years - I consider it to be complete and don't currently have any plans to go back to it.

Stylized digital painting of a figure looking at a shining blue planet behind a cloudy sky.

Stylized digital painting of a figure walking towards a factory through a shining orange field.

Stylized digital painting of red energy emanating from a giant leafy plant.

Stylized digital painting of a figure before a smoky field. Runes encircle the sun, which lies low on the horizon.

Looking back at the sketch archives again, these are all from March 2024. #art #digitalart #fantasy #illustration

⚔️♻️ BLADE & WHEEL ♻️⚔️
graebor.itch.io/blade-and-wh...

Created in a week for #WHEELJAM. Check out my interpretation of the wheel as a battle system and exploration mechanic. This idea's been lodged in my brain almost since I heard about the jam, and it was a joy to build it out!
#gamedev #indiedev

Was it worth staying up until 5am to make an unnecessarily dramatic battle entry sequence? Yes. Will I actually be able to finish this thing before the deadline on a couple hours of sleep? Uh...

Thanks! The trick is that half the options are always negative - even during exploration some of the actions are things that will make your journey take longer or decrease the chance of treasure, so you don't want to use the big wedge on those 😉

The other half of this idea is using the wheel to traverse the world. You travel along a set path towards a boss fight, but your wheeling affects the likelihood of random battles and treasure along the way!

Today's #WHEELJAM update - it's rough and pretty hard to follow what's going on, but the bones of the combat system are working!

More refined mockup showing a character in profile and The Wheel being used to take actions during a battle.

Which has started to take on a bit of a life of its own now. Did this mockup as a culmination of all my mulling over the past while leading up to the jam - and it's feeling like something I think would be fun! Now to see if I can execute 👀

Rough mockup sketch of two characters facing off in a battle with The Wheel in the middle.

The wheel is a mini puzzle to figure out the optimal way to use a small set of actions by thinking a few moves ahead, which is conceptually pretty close to something like Slay the Spire, so I started thinking about a kind of mashup...

Rough mockup sketch of a player using The Wheel to navigate a grid-based dungeon.

An early idea was this kind of wheel-driven dungeon crawler, where you move in the direction of the chosen quadrant, moving more spaces depending on how full it is. I feel like there might be something here, but I couldn't quite get it to click for myself so I moved on with brainstorming.

🛞 #WHEELJAM time! 🛞 Here’s a thread where I’ll attempt to post a few status updates. Very excited about my idea so I hope I can execute it well 👀

Congrats!! Very excited for y’all 🎉