Novice developer Arsen Smetanyak talked about an unusual Valentine's Day gift he created. It's a puzzle game called Our Perfect Spot on the Gogot engine, where characters must always be nearby.
Novice developer Arsen Smetanyak talked about an unusual Valentine's Day gift he created. It's a puzzle game called Our Perfect Spot on the Gogot engine, where characters must always be nearby.
"On the eve of the holiday, it was the 20th of January, I still couldn't think of what gift to make with my own hands (my girlfriend and I have such an agreement - at least one gift made by our own efforts, not bought). Previously, I had already made a thematic website and Desktop Pet as gifts, so the logical continuation was a game that would describe some aspect of the relationship," explained Smetanyak on the Gamedev DOU forum.
The idea for the game came to him from the words of a girl who wanted to play the logic puzzle Is this Seat Taken? Arsen decided that the key gameplay element of his project would be dragging characters around a grid and taking into account everyone's wishes. He also immediately had the idea for a key mechanic, that his character and the girl's character should always be close together.
He decided to develop the game on the Godot engine because it was the only one he had experience with. Last year, Arsen Smetanyak, who was 18 years old, released a mobile 2D platformer called Our Squishy Hero, which was built on Godot.
"I chose Godot for development because my computer scientist recommended it. Until then, I had no experience working with engines, I had only made Snake and Sapper in C++ using SDL," the developer noted.
Arsen planned to complete Our Perfect Spot in 15–20 minutes because he didn't want to spend all Valentine's Day watching his girlfriend "play on the computer." He intended to complete 15 levels, but only managed to complete 10.
“As it sometimes happens, the project rarely closes within the planned time frame. There were 2 days left before the holiday, and I had to test everything thoroughly and replace all the UI prototypes with something sensible… In parallel, I made a build and sent it to friends for evaluation (it was my friends who found most of the bugs). The final build was made on February 13 at 11:12 PM, a few minutes before the deadline,” said Arsen Smetanyuk.
According to him, the girl really liked the gift, and the ending made her “shed tears of joy.” The passage took the planned 18 minutes.
"It turned out that this story had a happy ending: the deadlines were met, the satisfaction was received, and the girl is happy," the developer concluded.
Arsen noted that he made Our Perfect Spot freely available on itch.io.
