I don’t normally write post-mortems after my jam entries, but maybe I should. Usually the stress of throwing together something hacky is enough for me to just be happy to be done. This time however I don’t really want to talk about the project itself, but how well Godot leant itself to being used for a 3D 64 x 64 pixel game.

I suppose the main takeaway is that Godot makes it much easier to fake old-school 3D graphics than it would be to implement it from scratch in a 2D/bespoke engine.

The game itself is entirely made out of primitive shapes, no models, no textures. The rings are toruses with the settings turned way down, the “skybox” is a cylinder with the faces flipped and the ship is a tiny prism. Low poly “models” seemed like the way to go for such a low-res game. The particles are tiny planes “billboard”-ed to face the camera.

Being a 3D engine, 3D movement, rotation, collisions and cameras all come for free, and as much as I’d like to be able to write that myself, I’m glad that I didn’t have to think about it for a jam game. I had a bit of trouble with the lighting at first, I initially wanted everything to be coloured flatly– I thought that might read better in a lower resolution– but after playing around found the shading in the pixels much more easily read at smaller sizes, and decided not to fight against it.

To crunch the game down to 64 x 64 pixels, the main game scene is a child of a SubViewport node and rendered to a sprite in a 2D scene (unfortunately this doesn’t seem to display on macOS), with UI elements (the score and heart sprites) overlaid. The sprite is set to a display using nearest neighbour for crunchy pixels rather than the smeary rendering Godot uses by default. In the project settings, the game is set to be 64 x 64 pixels and Godot handles the scaling of the window with stretch mode viewport and scale mode integer, meaning the game will only ever display at a multiple of 64 x 64, and will render with big chunky pixels when displayed in a bigger window (ie, the 512 x 512 window here on itch.io).

While the concept isn’t massively original, I’m happy with how it turned out. I had some grander ideas for 3D games that I wasn’t sure would translate well to the small size, but now I’m curious how far I could push this format. 🤔

While I am post-mortem-ing though, a few things I wish I had done, and will endeavour to do next game jam:

• Spent more time on the UI
• Composed my own background music
• More attention to the game loop, life pickups, better difficulty scaling, etc