Ground Skimmer – A ZX Spectrum-inspired arcade flying game

[redribera]

Hi everyone!

I’ve just released the first playable version of Ground Skimmer, a small retro arcade game I’ve been working on with Godot.

The game is inspired by the classic Tornado Low Level (1984) by Costa Panayi, which I used to play many years ago on the ZX Spectrum. Rather than creating a direct remake, I wanted to take that original gameplay idea and build my own small arcade game around it.

The project has also been a personal experiment in getting back into game development and exploring how AI-assisted development tools can fit into my workflow.

It’s built with Godot 4 and GDScript, and the current version runs directly in the browser.

Play on LowPlay:

Ground Skimmer · LowPlay

Play on itch.io:

Ground Skimmer by LowPlay

This is my first public version, so there are still things I’d like to improve and experiment with.

Any feedback from fellow Godot developers would be very welcome.

[normalized]

Collisions should be more forgiving.

[redribera]

Thanks for the feedback! I really appreciate it. Making the collisions a bit more forgiving is definitely something I’ll likely work on for the next version.

[Yadrei]

I rejoin normalized. And also about that, it would be cool to easily see the difference between buildings where we can pass over to the ones we can’t.

I crashed into one while thinking I could pass over

[redribera]

Thanks for the feedback! I tried to preserve the collision system of the original game, where some buildings can never be flown over, even at higher altitude.

That said, I agree that it can sometimes feel unclear to the player. For the next version I’m already experimenting with a more consistent and readable collision system, even if that means moving a little further away from the original game’s mechanics.

I think it will make the gameplay feel fairer and easier to understand.

[normalized]

If anything, the game plays and feels too close to TLL. You have a plenty of room to further “modernize” the gameplay (and visuals) while keeping the main essence of the original’s idea, just like you stated here:

I wanted to take that original gameplay idea and build my own small arcade game around it.
So try to achieve that.

Interpret and improve the original, instead of replicating it. The game had slick stylized look and feel for its time. I’d try to transpose that into the present.

[Yadrei]

I rejoin normalized once again.

keep in mind that standards from the past were a lot less higher then now. Wanting to « copy/paste » the original one is good, but adapted to modern standards

[redribera]

Thanks a lot to both of you for the feedback — I really appreciate it.

Something interesting is that I actually started with a more personal reinterpretation of some of the mechanics. For example, collisions with objects such as trees or antennas were initially based on the distance between their centers and the aircraft. In practice, though, I didn’t really like the result. It felt too forgiving, and I had the impression that part of the original difficulty was being lost.

That’s why I eventually moved to a stricter tile-based collision system, where the collision becomes exact once the center of the aircraft passes the north side of the object’s center. It is definitely closer to the original behaviour, but I also understand the point that this can sometimes feel inconsistent or unclear from a modern player’s perspective.

I have quite a few ideas in my head for improving the game, although I don’t always have as much time — or knowledge yet — as I’d like to turn all of them into reality.

Right now I’m also trying to learn more about working properly with sprites and visual presentation. I started the whole project with a 320x200 viewport, and I’m beginning to realise that I may eventually need to double the tile size and rethink part of the visual scale if I want to improve readability and detail.

One of the things I’m experimenting with at the moment is the aircraft itself. I’m not completely happy with using a pure top-down view for the plane. Since the rest of the game already uses a kind of pseudo-perspective, I’m now trying to give the aircraft a more perspective-based look so that it fits better with the visual language of the scene.

Interestingly, this takes me somewhat back toward the visual approach of the original game again, even though my intention is to give Ground Skimmer a stronger identity of its own.

This is still very much a work in progress, but I’d be really interested to know what you think about this direction, especially whether this perspective-based aircraft fits better with the pseudo-perspective of the environment, or whether a cleaner top-down approach would work better.

Your comments are genuinely useful. They’re helping me think about where preserving the original makes sense, and where Ground Skimmer should start becoming more of its own game.

Thanks again for taking the time to play it and share such valuable feedback!