The level I made was a simple one. The mechanics I added were small. It was still a good experience, and it showed me that if I wanted to actually make a game instead of using it as an excuse to learn a new language, I should use a game engine. Something like Unity, Game Maker or Godot (though I didn't know about Godot at the time).
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#### Kaboom
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#### Learning Kaboom
So, I started learning JavaScript by making games in it.
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My original plan was a top-down shooter taking inspiration from Magic Survival, Vampire Survivors and similar games. However, the project quickly became a mess and I wasn't working on it much. One of the problems was that Kaboom wasn't very optimized so I had to work around its problems a lot. I even added a bump.lua port to it (the original port was made by someone else who did 99% of the work, I just adapted the TypeScript version to Kaboom).
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#### Mark Loops
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The only game I managed to do here was a small game for a tiny Kaboom-themed jam, Mark Loops. It's a joke game where the joke is that everything is made up of one of the standard game sprites, "Mark". The level, the player, the obstacles, the title page letters.
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I had no idea what to do for gameplay, so I added a bunch of random mechanics - flappy-bird-like jumps, asteroids-like flying. It was my first finished game in a long time (Bullet Limbo wasn't really finished), and it reminded me how all the tiny details like menus take up much more time than you expect. I did the mechanics in a few hours and spent 1.5 days figuring out how to make the game remember you won a previous level and send you to the next one, how to draw menus and how to pass that information between game screens.
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#### Hero Defense (cahiddr【仮】)
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Once again, I wanted to use an "actual" game engine instead of playing around with code. So I picked Godot, which seemed like a good mix between engine features (maps, sprites, animations and built-in and configurable via gui) and code. Unity is an overkill sometimes with its huge installations.
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This was my main game project, and it still is, in a way. The idea changed many times, but the general inspiration was an Android game called [Starrows](https://starrows.outerark.com/). You build a base which spawns automated units, so there is a constant background "war" happening. You control a hero which both manages the base and participates in key battles. I was torn between a more Moba-like Starrows and something closer to Hero Defense maps in Warcraft 3. In the end, I picked defense.
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The closest game to implement this idea is probably Thronefall. It does some aspects differently from what I had in mind, but it's basically the game I was trying to make.
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#### Runie's Runecrafting
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I was often lost at what to work on in the Hero Defense game, and at one point I wanted to stop and make something smaller. Fans of Phase Connect, a VTuber agency, regularly hold game jams, and I wanted to join.
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I ended up not joining the jam and spending a month or two on the game instead of a week, but I finished it.
