From jQuery to Godot: How a Progress Bar Turned Into Fedorable Life
Retrospective on the creation and remastering of my definitive neckbeard video game.
GAMING
7/2/20263 min read
The jQuery of it All:
Back in 2015, I started working on a comedy life simulator called Fedorable Life. At the time, I was primarily a web developer, so naturally I built the entire thing using jQuery. If you know anything about web development, jQuery is affectionately nicknamed “jQueezy”. Because it’s quite buns.
If it was so buns, why did I make a neckbeard game in that language? The answer is that the whole project started because of work.
One day I was tasked with creating a progress page for a web application. While working on it, I had a realization:
A progress bar is basically just a reverse life bar.
Surprised it took me that long to think of that. Life is just a series of progress bars, so I guess that means that death is a series of… life bars? So I slapped some labels over it: “Energy”, “Hunger”, “Accomplishment” and “Excitement”. Then I added a button called “Internet Arguments” that would increase or decrease the Accomplishment life bar. Then the next thing I knew, I drew 50 fedoras, combed Reddit for inspiration, and uh… game happened.
The original version of Fedorable Life was built almost entirely out of web technologies. To save the game I used cookies, and for some reason I stored all the writing in XML. Looking back, it was held together with pure determination and if statements.
But it worked. That's all I cared about.
The Remake:
Years later, around 2020, I decided to remake Fedorable Life in Godot 3.2.1 because I figured there was a niche in the world that could use another neckbeard simulator. And I picked up Godot because I wanted something open source and it was kinder to 2D games than Unity. I was hoping that some of my web development experience would transfer over. Unfortunately life doesn’t work that way.
The only thing that truly survived the migration was the artwork. The PNG files came over. Some of the writing transferred over, but I had to convert them from XML to JSON first. Everything else got left behind.
The architecture was different.
The UI was different.
The animation system was different.
Just everything was different.
One thing I immediately missed was how much web development does for you automatically.
Need a button?
<button>Best Game Ever!</button>
Need a popup?
Words. With a styled smokescreen and an animation thrown in there.
In Godot if I wanted a modal window with an animation, I needed to make a modal window. Then the animation. Then the smokescreen. Then make sure the player can’t click through it because… maybe?
The transition was like transitioning from an automatic car to an airplane.
But with the power of pure determination, I was able to push through it. I haven’t truly mastered Godot with this game, but I’ll get better every game I make. I already got another game in the oven ;)
The biggest benefit of rebuilding the game wasn't the technology itself. It was the opportunity to clean up bad decisions and bad designs. The remake let me reorganize systems, simplify logic, and remove a lot of technical debt that had accumulated over the years. And because of this clean up, I was able to expand the game far beyond what the original version was capable of.
Below is a comparison between the original jQuery web browser game and the current Steam version:
The jQuery version taught me about solo game dev.
The Godot version allowed me to actually build the game I wanted to make (more or less).
And because of this work task there is now this neckbeard life simulator out in the world.
Side note: Funny thing too is that there aren't any progress bars in the Steam version of Fedorable Life anymore. They've all been upgraded to radial bars.
So I guess after all these years... the progress bar finally progressed.
