Hey everyone,
About a year ago I discovered Godot and almost instantly fell in love with it. I opened up four or five different projects, drew my own minimal pixel art placeholders, and just messed around like I always do. After about six months of experimenting, something I didn’t expect happened: one of those experiments turned into an actual fun mechanic, and before I knew it I had accidentally built a small game prototype around it.
https://youtube.com/shorts/pUzySU7xQcc?si=6b0zJp73KWwzAoEE
That game is slowly turning into PAWSTRONAUTS, a platformer (with local coop) about 10 cute animal astronauts who crash-land on a hostile alien planet. You stun enemies by jumping on their heads, pick them up, and throw them against walls, into pits, or into other enemies to take them out. Boss fights are more complex with 4 phases with bullet hell elements 
Every character is a life. Lose one, the next steps in. Lose them all, game over.
A big inspiration is Super Mario World (SNES) a game I still pick up every now and then. Almost 30 years after I first played it as a kid, it still holds up.
A couple of things I’ve been tinkering with that are super new and fun for me, and that fit the “space” setting nicely:
-
Procedural animation layered on top of the pixel sprites, like squash, stretch and tilt based on velocity. Lets the hand-drawn animation frames stay pretty minimal while feeling “weightless” and I like this very much in this setting.
-
A custom post-processing shader to make things glow and look slightly luminous.
I’m really enjoying the dev process so far, and it’s not just the game development itself, it’s everything around it and the massive learning curve. I tend to plan a little too big (aiming for a Steam release even though I have zero experience with that), but learning by doing is incredibly exciting and, surprisingly, relaxing for me.
Everything’s still a work in progress, but the core loop feels pretty final for me. Right now I’m working on:
-
Almost done: Building the first world (5 to 7 levels)
-
Fine-tuning the first world boss
-
Fine-tuning the ~20 basic enemies (patrolling, floating, projectile, flying, teleporting types)
-
Drawing tilesets and decoration assets for Worlds 2 to 6
-
Programming the remaining five world bosses
-
Thinkering around the coop mechanic, like designing levels specifically for coop.
-
*Music (a freelancer is handling that, I tried it myself and failed miserably and gave up :D)
-
Going trough some projects here for inspiration
Funfact: In the earlier prototype I had roguelike-style procedural level generation and powerups, a block-placement system and a projectile/shooting mechanic. I cut all of it. The shooter and blocks got in the way of the rhythm I wanted, and I just couldn’t make the procedurally generated levels feel fun. There is still some code left of that in my project
A couple of asks while I’m here if its okay:
- A vertical slice demo is going up very soon. I’d love it if a few of you would be up for playtesting, and even better if anyone could record some footage, seeing how first-time players approach the game would be hugely valuable. Happy to return the favour for your projects
- I put a bit about myself in my bio if you want to know more, plus my socials (There is one Gameplayvideo on YouTube) and the Steam page that actually went online some hours ago. Always happy to follow back and wishlist other devs’ projects too
Looking forward to any feedback!