Hey all you cool cats and gangsters!

About The Process

I wanted to do a process dev log about how I went about making this game with the Godot game engine. I'm a big hip hop fan and hopefully that comes through in the game! The idea of a hip hop alien is something I was playing around with before this game jam and it just so happened that the jam criteria inspired a boom box meter for me, so I started with that.

I have this alien character I was drawing prior to the game jam, he's a visitor from outer space who got tangled up in the street scene. I've been listening to a ton of Aesop Rock lately, since his two newer albums dropped in late 2025 and he's a bit of the inspiration behind the character with his lyric often pointing towards the supernatural and extraterrestrial.

So There's The Concept

I started jotting down notes on how to build out the game and tried to come up with as many ideas as I could about how the game should work. I limited myself to two pages of an idea notebook I keep to try to keep things constrained. You can see how some of the chicken scratch made it into the game with the level design doodles.

I had to truncate a lot of the flavor to fit within the deadline. I originally wanted to include a mechanic where the music that's playing has a tempo that corresponds to your flow but had to scrap that idea as it was too tough to source the proper music files. Not to mention coding a tempo detection or some kind of system for that felt too daunting.

Day One - Assets

The first day was exclusively asset creation, I wanted to move fast during development and not get distracted by trying to adjust the assets on the go so I set out to make all the assets in one sitting using Aseprite. I ended up spending about 8 hours on day one making the tile set, characters, and effects. I chose a limited color pallet that felt kind of spacey from Lospec.com called Oil 6.

I started with the tile set at 16px x 16px to keep things easy. This one could have probably been optimized and there's definitely unneeded/duplicated tiles but I was flying by the seat of my pants.

I found that keeping the file format as .PNG and updating the tile set on the fly during development was helpful. It auto updates in Godot too so you can use the file and update it in a sort of back and forth process.

Then I worked on the character files which too WAY TOO LONG. The break dance animation was the roughest one to get right.

The spacemen enemy was just a matter of tweaking the player sprite a bit. I intended to add a shoot mechanic for the spacemen too but it got cut due to time, that's why there's a shoot animation in the sprite sheet.

Had to add in a UFO too, but ended up scrapping it's shoot mechanics for time as well. Maybe in a future update!

Day Two - Programming 

This was a doozy, I'm pretty familiar with the Godot game engine by now. I've made a handful of prototypes and other mini-games with it. I learned a ton about physics processes and input mapping and even tried some composition style coding with the movement, animations, and input handling. See in the scene tree the white circle icons? Those are individual .tscn files that can be reused between the player and the enemies to control movement.

When it came down to the wire, I ended up phoning in the enemy AI a bit, they're pretty basic and just use a bunch of timers, a raycast node, and area detection to determine when they see you and when they can attack. I wasn't super happy with how they turned out and wanted to try to get some more knockback effects added in. But it's a game jam, you gotta' cut corners somewhere! 

The UFO's are on a PathFollow2D Node that animates on a timer, I wanted to revisit and just tween the progress along the path, that might make them feel a little more alive.

The tutorial machines are pretty nifty, just some basic area detection of the player and they toggle on a message customized via @export in the script. EZPZ.

Thanks for your interest!

Hope you enjoyed the game, I'd love to discuss game dev with you if you have any questions! Please leave a comment if you'd like, yo!