Rapid Roll is BACK!!! Faster, Modern, Smoother!

Its Rapid Rolling Time!!!

hey everyone, it's been a while since I published something on itch (*cough* Astro Impact! De_Make *cough*) 

Lots of things have happened since, if you are my follower, then you probably did catch the several Horror games I did. I'm not proud of them, at all and I have come to the decision of not support them, in terms of updates or list them in my itch profile in the future. 

Anyways, when I made the last devlog on Astro Impact! De_Make, I did mention that I got a job because of it (Kinda, when I was marketting it, the Android version, I ended up getting an interview set up and I presented my itch.io profile as my portfolio and I ended up getting a job)

I did get laid off, in the most disrespectful way possible; lack of communication and 3.5 months of pay owed to me. I survived on the pay on those horror game jams that I did and now I am broke and can't feed my kittens (My cat, Kido Hyde, gave birth to 2 kittens on Dec 30th, 2024)

Anyways, lots of things happened last year since the lack of a job. If you have played this game, you can notice the bottom down below indicating that the game was made in Defold. Astro Impact was made in Godot so... what gives?

THE TECH PROBLEM

I was using Godot Game Engine since February 2023 (I did try it a few months prior but didn't like it. Because I was using the mono (C#) version)

The first problem I encountered with Godot was the updates. Specifically, the jump from 3.5 to 4.0 shortly after I published the game jam version of Astro Impact! DM (That's what I used to call it :D) the update broke my project. Literally everything. I had to start from scratch. 

Why did you update? Long term support. I knew that Astro Impact! DM wasn't going to be a project I do in just 3 months and be done with, so if there was a time I'd upgrade the tech, it had to be then especially given that the scripting language was changing to GDScript 2.0.

I didn't mind, it was actually an opportunity for me to learn VCS software (git)

I worked on other games to polish my skills in the engine, and I was in love, till the updates. If you are a Godot User, you should remember how 4.0 was barely useable when it came to the intellisense or rather code completion, it was everywhere and annoying. It was fixed sometime later. The issues kept piling on and on after every update. Why did I keep updating? There were always fixes, improvements and additions for whatever (Nodes especially) I was using as well as somethings that I were using that became deprecated (Example: CPUParticles2D). 

The last straw was the update to 4.3. The update straight up broke things and overall, the engine was laggy, caused memory leaks and was taking too long to launch a game. Those issues translated to the exports as well. It was time to wait for a fix. I stopped working on Astro Impact and started doing other game jams. I did the Horror Yahaha ones as well as attempting other smaller ones where I could use Godot. 

I worked on the first version of Rapid Roll DX. It was a chore waiting for the game to launch 5 SECONDS every time. I took to Reddit, and I was told that it was being addressed. Github issue #95772. It's still open to this day BTW. And to make matters worse, the Release Candidates and Dev builds for 4.4 still have the same issue and they just simplify it to: "Your PC has low quality Drivers, therefore there is nothing we can do" My PC has full support for OpenGL 4.0 btw and funny enough, Defold also uses an Adapter yet isn't as slow to launch or sluggish.

Web exports were borked as well. Astro Impact! De_Make on OperaGX got lots of criticism regarding sluggishness as well as some issues like non looping audio which I hadnt even touched, and were working well locally.

I tried out Pico-8 while "waiting for Godot" and I felt as if Lazy Dev's Tutorials were too long. They were about 44 minutes per episode, and I felt as if I wasn't learning anything, I wanted to learn Lua as quick as possible. I looked up engines that were using Lua as their main scripting language and I found Defold

THE TECH SOLUTION

Not going to lie, starting out with Defold Engine was fun at first, but when it came to actually start making Rapid Roll DX, I almost gave up. There weren't a lot of Video Tutorials, and the forums weren't of much help, so I took to the Official Discord, I aired out my issues and the next day, I woke up to a message from a developer, 8BitSkull who had designed the game to the very extend I had made it in Godot. 
I was shocked. And I thanked him, a lot. It was mostly the Character controller as well as the logic behind the factories and collisions that was troubling me. 

2 months later, here we are, my very first commercial game, Rapid Roll DX

THE DEVELOPMENT, NEW TECH

After the player controller was done, I configured the different platforms and game objects to my preferences. I wanted to make the game very close to the original, but a bit modern (Portrait resolution for smartphones as well different platform support)

Defold offered several advantages:

1. Stability. I can update the engine without worrying (mostly) about breaking changes

2. 1 Click Exports: All it takes is 1 click to get your game running on the platform of choice (Technically, after clicking Bundle, you then pick your location and then it exports)

3. Small Export Sizes. If you have checked out Astro Impact, you can verify that it is actually 140MB despite being incomplete. Its only 1 endless level and nothing more. Granted, I do have uncompressed .wav audio which amounts to 22MB, the actual game with .ogg music is only 86MB as of the last update on Play Store. Rapid Roll DX is complete (Ok Adventure mode isn't there) with multiple music tracks and comes in at 12MB when installed on the mobile version and is 6MB on Linux, 7.5MB on Windows and a 5.2MB Web export (Thus why it loads up quickly)

The game is called Rapid Roll DX because I added multiple game modes. The original game only had 1 game mode. 

I added the following: 

Time Attack: get the highest score within 3 minutes

Score Attack: get as much score as long as you live

Adventure Mode: A hybrid between Bounce and Final Fantasy (Not Available as of now: 30th January 2025)

I still need player feedback to make it even better, still.

Future Additions (For the Google Play Version at least):

Achievements,

Global Leaderboards,

Cloud Saves

CONCLUSION

Going forward, Defold will be my main engine. I'll still be using Pico-8 to attempt making demake versions

SUPPORT

Please try out Rapid Roll DX, you can play it on the web you can also provide feedback by pressing the feedback button in the about section. If you can, please support me as well. It'll help me fund my addiction to groceries as well as paying bills and keeping the lights on.