Climb Up

At some point last year I started development on a game because I had an idea that felt like it was good (i’m not sure I still feel that way), and a some free time because of Covid.

The concept

The basic idea is “battle royale but as a platformer”. Some amount of players would start at the bottom of a pyramid made of pre-made platform rooms with obstacles. The goal would be to reach the top first. The actual pyramid layout would of course be procedurally generated. Players could go through each others but for interactions between players, I added two actions :

• A dash, which would allow colisions and push players around, possibly making them fall into traps.
• A shield, which would prevent getting pushed by the dashes (and instead push the attacker away). I’m not sure how to make it so that players don’t just always shield, maybe there should be an energy/cooldown limit, maybe it could impair movement (added gravity?).

The idea would be that you try to prevent others from going up by pushing them around, while avoiding being pushed.

Another mechanic I thought of was having the lowest floors collapse gradually to eliminate slow players.

The execution

So far I have a fraction of these things, basically just the basic movement (without wall jumps) and the dash/shield mechanic, all using premade free assets I found online.

The tech

At the moment the game is made with Godot 3. After looking a bit at the available options (UE4 and Unity mostly), Godot seemed like a perfect choice for the scope of my game (if it was a 3D game, I would have considered other engines), and I read great things about it.

I was very impressed by how nice it was to use out of the box, and how much I could accomplish in a short amount of time and with no experience with any kind of video game development whatsoever.

It seems like Godot 4 has been approaching and contains a lot of improvements and I feel like its release would be a perfect excuse to continue this game so stay tuned !