Before the Beginning: Kicking off Shoot Into the Void

Shoot Into the Void is a casual game that plays on the cliche “a shot in the dark”. That’s the core game mechanic - you have a brief moment when the environment is visible, but it fades to black. You’re only able to shoot your enemies in the darkness. We dive deeper into the mechanics in this post, check it out!

Who are we?

This game is a collaboration between hsaka and gameboymarcus. We’re both game devs from Trinidad & Tobago! We’ve always kept tabs on our projects, and have competed in the same game jams before. However, this is the first time working together. Why? Why not?

Why Godot?

It was the engine in the middle. Hsaka is really good at Phaser, while I’m not - I haven’t used it in nearly two years! I’ve been deep into Unity, and hsaka is familiar but would need some time to refresh his knowledge. Godot 3 was the porridge at the perfect temperature. And while we both know C#, we enjoy using GDScript.

Build system

One of the first things to figure out with your game is how to distribute it. We decided that we’ll make a WebGL game. While Windows is likely the most popular OS, you capture even more by making a browser game. For a game jam, this is perfect - we want more people to play, rate and share our game as easily as possible. The downside is typically performance, native builds are more likely to utilise your computer resources more efficiently and run smoothly. It’s not something we’re overly concerned about for our game but we’ll keep an eye on it.

To prep for this jam, I created a test project to figure out how to build a Godot game on GitHub and upload to itch.io.

Feel free to grab the code for your own project: https://github.com/msanatan/GodotBuildExample. There were a couple of gotchas I was glad to figure out beforehand!

The great thing about a build system is that once we push our update, it’s playable in 2 minutes! We’re hoping to take advantage of it and have shorter feedback cycles with players. Also, there’s a lower chance we’ll make a mistake when building for the final submission!

What’s in a name?

To be honest, we’re both horrible at naming things lol. We actually reached out to a Discord server for Caribbean game devs for ideas. We shared the premise and from the feedback this name stuck to us the most. So far, it works!

Project planning

Even for small projects, it’s good to see what’s working on and what needs to be worked on later. As a team we need visibility to be in sync. And we’re both part time, so we need to be able to quickly see outstanding work and prioritise as we get closer to the deadline. Our project is already hosted on GitHub, and GitHub’s project feature has come a long way since launch. Before we’d have to use Trello or another tool. It’s quite handy to have it all in one service, the less friction the better.

You can keep track of our plans and progress here: https://github.com/users/msanatan/projects/3/views/1

Road to the prototype

Well we’ve come a long way in a week, but there’s a lot more to do still. The foundation looks good, I think once we get the darkness and the damage, we’re good for the core game loop. A progression system that makes it repeatable, I think by week 2 we’ll be solid!

Thanks for reading, and keep up with our updates. We’d love for you to play and share with your friends. Happy gaming!