The idea is simple: break the ice and complete a full development cycle (idea, code, bugfix, deploy) in a single afternoon.

Theme & Objective

The player is an object that follows the mouse with a smooth delay (lerp) and must dodge circular saws.

We want to learn how to make a quick little game using some RigidBodies and a CharacterBody. It’s the first thing I imagine; surely there are thousands of ways to do it, but I’m trying to solve it however my instinct tells me at the moment. Obviously, this post was written after development, but next time maybe I’ll post the plan before and the result after to see what happened.

The Logic

The idea is to move the player and dodge the saws falling from the sky. Since it’s probably going to be too easy to dodge, I plan to make the game get much faster by scaling the enemy respawn speed. I guess to make it a bit more entertaining I’ll add a timer to see how far you can get.

The Bug of the Day

I ran into a classic Godot 4 problem: The saws weren’t detecting the floor. It turns out there is a property that needs to be enabled to activate collision reporting.

  1. Configure Contact Monitor on the RigidBody to detect impact.
  2. Set Max Contact Report to 1.

Completed Tasks

  • Create main Node2D scene and attach a Level Controller to orchestrate everything.
  • Add a CanvasLayer to set up all the UI.
  • Add logic to Instantiate/Delete enemies (no complex Arrays, pure web performance).
  • CharacterBody with smoothed movement (Lerp).
  • Add Reset Level button (Instant Game Over).
  • Add a TileMap to build the level quickly.

Notes

  • It probably won’t have sound, I don’t think I’ll make it (and I didn’t 😅).
  • I didn’t sit down to figure out how to configure a complex theme; that’s pending for next time.

Play

The game runs natively in the browser.

👉 Play on Itch.io

Assets: Pixel Adventure 1 by Pixel Frog.

Approximate time: 2 hours. translate by: Google translator.