Getting my hands dirty

This is the first prototype I’ve made in Godot and I’m actually pretty happy with how it turned out.

I also just switched to Pop!_OS on my personal machine and something’s been causing some performance weirdness. I’m confident it’s not the game though; I installed it on another machine to test and it ran great.

The prototype is basically the movement for a spaceship. I wanted it physics based so I can cause chaos later.

About the prototype

Overall, Godot impressed me. I’m honestly shocked I pulled this ship controller off in a single day.

I watched a bunch of YouTube videos from other devs doing similar stuff, but none of them had the exact feel I wanted.

As an Elite Dangerous fan, I wanted something more action forward; but still 3rd person only; so I positioned the camera to show a lot more ahead of the ship.

The physics are tuned to feel snappy while still having a bit of “floatiness.” I’m using a spring arm and interpolating pitch/yaw. Damping + acceleration also take mass into account. I might add a button later that disables linear damping for cruising (or maybe I just change how the accelerator works depending on the direction this takes).

I want high action; so I can’t let the player lose too much control; but there could be moments where I turn the dampeners off and the spring arm locks to an axis so the player can watch their ship get tossed like a toy.

Very excited about the possibilities of physics based movement.

My Plan

I’m pretty settled that this is going to be a space game because:

• Spaceships are easy to model and animate. Better ROI.
• I love Elite Dangerous.
• It’s a solid niche. I don’t see many piloting games lately.
• Physics can drastically enhance emergent gameplay.

Current thought direction: roguelike-ish. Maybe like a MegaBonk in space.

But I also want to push deeper and elevate the medium a little; I’ll talk through that later when I have something more concrete.

Next prototype

Next weekend, if I have time, I want to prototype basic combat: enemies + weapons.

For the roguelike direction, I think I’ll go with auto aim + auto fire. But I’ll still give the player at least one manually aimed weapon so it doesn’t devolve into pure “fly fast + shoot everything on rails.”

There should be consequences and rewards based on skill.

Talk to you soon, Nico