Tilk Post Mortem

Overview

I am a classically studied developer with roughly 8 years of backend web experience. Tilk is my first foray into game development, minus a short stint creating a Pokemon Emerald rom hack for the proposal to my wife. Coincidentally, Tilk was also created for her, as she really loves word games.

Tilk is a pretty standard digital implementation of the dropquote puzzle, in which players unscramble a quote by moving characters from one grid to another, keeping characters in their respective columns. I started development of Tilk in January 2025 and got it to a releasable point in mid-April. Naively, I had initially targeted March as my goal for release. I still think I could’ve hit that if I had cut certain features. For example, I spent a day or two getting controllers and remappable buttons set up, and of course, a few disparate hours setting up focus neighbors. However, I chose to give Tilk the “full treatment” because this was supposed to be a learning opportunity and if I couldn’t do things fully and “correctly” in a game as small as this then what hope was there for a bigger game? After a few months break to work on other projects, I came back to Tilk to give it new life with more effects, animations, and controller bug fixes.

There are countless one-off videos or articles, but here are some shout-outs for resources I consumed over the course of development:

• StayAtHomeDev - good tutorials, but I really love his showcase videos. They were great for reigniting motivation when I was in a slump
• DevWorm - Easy to follow tutorials
• CoffeeCrow - Solid videos on accessibility settings and configuring keybindings
• Godot Shaders - shader library
• GameUIDatabase - screenshots and videos from many games, good for inspiration

Surprising Challenges

Implementing a guided tutorial was one of the harder features. How do you even search “tutorial on creating a tutorial?” My solution was to create an InputRestrictor node that would act as a wall, swallowing user input that wasn’t targeting specifically allowed nodes. I will gladly accept suggestions on other solutions because I don’t know if this is a feasible solution outside of UI heavy games.

The save system is JANK. By the time I realized how bad it was, it had embedded itself in too many places to fix given how small this game is. Time for the duct tape and to just leave it as lessons learned.

IOS in app purchasing. Why, oh why, is there not a good built-in solution? I ended up using this plugin, but I would much prefer a first-party solution.

My Thoughts on Godot

The engine is fantastic. The node structure can feel close to web development, which made it easy for me to learn. I have not tried Unity or Unreal and at this point, I don’t necessarily feel the need to. Godot is getting the job done for me and with the increase in community size, I can assume it will only get better from here.

I wish animating UIs was more flexible. I use containers everywhere to make my UIs responsive, but this destroys any chance of using the animation player. It’s not the end of the world to use Tweens, but viewing an animation within the animation player is just so much nicer than loading the game.

Advice to New Game Devs

1. Just get started. If you don’t care for a small, full-feature project, create a playground project with many scenes exploring mechanics you enjoy playing.
2. Spend the time to make a level editor. The few hours I spent on that saved me many hours of tedious resource creation and testing each resource afterwards since I could see the level right then and there.
3. Become familiar with Tweens, AnimationPlayer, and shaders. These 3 really add life and weight to game actions.
4. If you’re in a mid-project slump, drop it for a week. Go play a game from your backlog, listen to your favorite OST, or doom-scroll asset packs on itch. Breaks are important to reignite motivation.