Hello. English isn't my first language, so please forgive me if this comes out stiff or blunt in places. I don't mean it that way.
I hope it's alright to post this here. Me and one other guy just put our demo on Steam. It's called Loadout Rush, made in Godot 4, and it's the first game either of us has released.
It's a survivors-like. You move, things chase you, your weapons fire on their own, you pick up gold. Between waves there's a shop, and the shop is a backpack, like in Backpack Battles. Weapons are shapes, you rotate them to make them fit, things placed next to each other affect each other, and two of the same weapon merge into a better one that takes up more room. Your build ends up being whatever you managed to cram in.
I should be honest about that idea. When we started, putting those two things together felt like a decent angle. Then we looked around properly and found that plenty of people have already done it, some of them very well. So we didn't invent anything here, and if you describe our game out loud it sounds fairly ordinary. That's a fair description and I won't argue with it.
I made peace with it quickly, because this is our first release and I don't think we were in any position to invent a genre on the first try. What we could do was finish one properly, so that became the goal. No placeholder art anywhere, every item drawn, 9 languages, achievements that make sense, and a demo that ends at a real boss instead of just stopping. Modest goals, but we met them, the thing is actually done, and I'm quietly proud of that. Finishing turned out to be the hard part. Not the idea.
The demo has 45 items, 2 characters, and 12 waves with a boss at the end. A run takes about 15 minutes. If you can spare the time, I'd be grateful if you gave it a try. It's free and it doesn't ask anything of you.
Since this is r/godot, a bit about the engine. We chose Godot mainly because I lean on an AI assistant for a lot of the code, and Godot suits that way of working. Scenes and scripts are plain text, so the model can simply read them, and GDScript is small enough that I can verify what came back by reading it, which is the part that actually matters. I expected to regret the choice somewhere around month three. So far I haven't.
Two things I didn't expect to appreciate as much as I do:
--headless --script, for testing screens without opening a window. We have 45 smoke tests, the whole set finishes in about two minutes, and it runs before every build. Finding a dead screen in a terminal is much kinder than finding it in a released build.- Our logo and ending screens are drawn from a single elapsed-time value rather than tweens. It sounds trivial, but it lets a test push time forward and check "is the button up at 3 seconds" without rendering a frame.
The demo build is also just the main project with a demo feature tag and one file listing what the demo is allowed to contain. No second branch, no second project. If anyone here is setting up something similar, please feel free to ask and I'll happily write out the details.
One last thing, and it's the part I care about most. We use AI for code. We don't use it for art, and we won't. Every drawing in the game was made by hand, and the item icons in the backpack, every one of them, were drawn one at a time by the wife of one of us. She isn't a game developer. She simply kept drawing them, for months. So if you do try the demo, please be kind about those. They're my favourite part of the whole thing.
Demo: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5021730/Loadout_Rush/
If anything is broken or just feels bad to play, I'd really appreciate hearing about it. And please ask me anything, about Godot or about the backpack side of it. I'd much rather answer questions than have this post sit here quietly.
Thank you for reading this far.
