The Final Update

So, here we are with the final update to this little learning project of mine.

After a summer break since the last update, I finally finished all the things I wanted to add to the game.

The game now has a music track with an option to control the volume, which is saved and loaded between sessions. There is also a local high score system displaying the top five scores. Your score is saved on game over, exit, or retry, so it won't get lost even if you decide to quit the game in the middle of a run.

I've also improved the overall look and feel of the gameplay scene. Previously, it didn't really match the general theme of the rest of the game, but now it follows the same visual style.

The Options and How to Play pages have been improved as well, both in terms of style and layout. They were originally created by manually positioning the different panels. Now, they use multiple containers that handle the positioning and layout of the UI elements, making the interface much more structured.

Besides all of the visual changes, I also improved the code here and there while trying to follow some of the design principles I've learned throughout the project. For example, I moved the responsibility of changing scenes away from individual UI components. The UI now emits events when the player requests an action, while the game script decides how to handle those requests.

The hardest update to finish

What can I say? This last update was probably the hardest one for me to complete.

Not because the things I had to implement were particularly difficult, but because some of them weren't really that interesting or challenging to me. Still, I knew that I wanted to finish them.

I had to push myself quite a bit to actually get everything done, and I had to keep reminding myself why I started this project in the first place.

I started it because I wanted to complete a game.

I deliberately picked a project with a clear and defined scope that I could actually finish. I wanted to learn Godot and become comfortable with the engine, but I also wanted to experience the entire process of finishing a game: releasing it, updating it, writing devlogs and announcements, and everything else that comes with putting a game out into the world.

So, with that "why" in mind, I managed to complete all the updates I had planned for this game.

What's next?

Now it's time to see what I want to learn next and what project I'll choose to work on.

This project taught me a lot more than just how to recreate a Tetris-like game in Godot. It taught me about structuring game code, working with UI, saving player settings and data, releasing something before I consider it perfect, iterating on it after release, and, most importantly, actually bringing a project to an end.

I'm looking forward to taking what I've learned here into whatever I build next.

See you on my next project.

Thanks so much for the support and for following along with this little project.

Bogdan