Aphrodite’s Revenge

Aphrodite’s Revenge is our entry into the second 12 Days of Sketchruary game jam.

12 Days of Sketchruary typically takes place in February around Valentine’s day. The first year I created a little love-based game where players play as Eros (also known as Cupid) the god of love, trying to restore his big day after his bow is broken. It was a mini quest-based game that I was quite proud of.

For this year I decided to continue the “lovey” theme by making a sneak-em-up where the player must break into a prison in Hades to rescue their true love after Zeus locked him away. They play as Aphrodite, often referenced as the goddess of love and lust.

This game utilised several mechanics from classic sneaky games such as a top down/three quarter isometric view, vision cones and movement speed affecting sound and intentionally creating sounds to attract attention to the wrong place. In order to help the player I gave them the ability to perform a sleep spell on unsuspecting guards. This allows them to pass through potential choke points undetected.

The game is quite short and only has a single enemy type. It would be nice to finish this game, adding more variety in the guard types, allowing for more interesting and varied level designs. Perhaps slept enemies could have a chance to alert their colleagues.

While the AI is somewhat relentless in their pursuits and it can be a little hard to get past them because of this, it is ultimately not to challenging to cheese your way through the level and this would be something I’d like to fix.

During this jam I decided to try a new Godot module for navigation. It uses an implementation of the Detour library and has some more advanced features than the default Godot navigation node, such as dynamic objects. This allowed me to make slightly more complicated levels without having to write custom steering behaviour for the enemies. Using the default Godot navigation node, doors would have either been transparent to the enemy navigation or created a boundary that would see them locked into a specific room, defined by doors whether they were open or not. This is because the navigation map is pre-baked. With Godot-Navigation-Lite you can use dynamic obstacles and this allowed me to add doors that could be opened and closed with the AI somewhat aware of the updated navigation paths.

Ultimately, while very basic, I am quite pleased with this little game but I feel I must thank Kay Lousberg for the asset packs that made up the bulk of the models in the game.

Disclaimer the 12 Days of Sketchruary jam and other variants (such as the original 12 Days of Sketchmas) jams are hosted by me.

Support This Site

If you enjoyed this content consider giving a tip on Ko-fi to help us keep producing content alongside our products.

You may also like...