Hi everyone. 

I am pleased to announce the demo release of my game Castle Yokai.  It is a fun, easy-to-intermediate, side scrolling platformer with inspiration from Japanese folklore. 

It is playable in the browser and on touch screen devices or downloadable for desktop.

Hope you all have fun playing it and I welcome any feedback you can give.

This is the first 'real' game that I have tried to make.  I dabbled a little bit with Construct2 making educational material for my son, and never felt like I could make anything bigger.  

But then I discovered the Godot game engine, and suddenly making a larger game seemed feasible, so 14 months ago to this day I made my first commit to this project.  In the beginning I had no concept of level design so I made heaps of levels, but most of them didn't make the final cut.  Even when I thought I had the levels about right, I realised they were far too long and there was no way that I could feasibly make 30 levels in total as I had planned for the game.  So, about 3/4 of the way through the project, I decided to cut all the levels in half and the remnants of the cull are now the levels you see in the demo.  

Even though this is just a demo, it has been an epic journey to get here.  I am 43 years old with a full-time job and family and I manage to find about an hour a day to work on this game.  Boy do I have a new found respect for all game developers out there.  I now realise that any and every game that gets released to the see the light of day, no matter how bad or unpolished, is a small miracle forged by inspiration and serious dedication and grit.    

Kudos to all game developers out there!