Home Run!!!

Controls:

Space or Click to swing the bat

Hit the ball at the right time

3 strikes is game over. Swing again to restart.

Cute Games Club said to break your big dream game up into individual mechanics, and then build a tiny game for every mechanic. This is the first of those games for me. My dream game is basically just Paper Mario, so the mechanic here is about timing button presses -- inspired by Paper Mario's mechanic of defending against enemy attacks by pressing A at the right time, or getting bonus attack on your jump. 

The swing animation is 4 frames, and only one of them will hit the ball. There are 50 different paths the ball can take. Some of them are super unfair. My high score after playing about half an hour is 18. Share yours in the comments!

This game took me 3-4 hours to make total:

~ 1 hour animating in Procreate

~ 1 hour getting the animations working and the basic hit mechanic working in Godot

~ 1 hour making all the paths and implementing the score and game over systems

~ 1 hour playing with a hit stop effect, then ditching it, and then building the game

I've been learning and building little prototypes with Godot for about a year now, but it's a truly different process to build a complete game, even if it's just a tiny 4 hour project. So I would say the advice was pretty good. Looking forward to the next one