Gotic
A third-person RPG set on a 2 km island, for PC and Android, where every experience is a mod you can switch on or off.
- Status
- In development
- Engine
- Godot 4.7 (GDScript, Compatibility)
- Platforms
- PC, Android
Gotic started as a clone of Gothic-style RPGs and grew into an island of about 1.8 km² with beaches, forests, mountains, four towns and a plateau. You walk, run, swim and fly on a broomstick, and it plays the same with keyboard and mouse or touch controls.
Everything you can do on the island is a mod: the farm, fishing, the rowing boat, the night festivals, the bestiary, the photo camera… Each one lives in its own folder with its own code and tests. Delete the folder and the mod is gone, while the game and its test suite keep working.
Not a single model or sound was downloaded: all art and audio are generated in code. And almost all of the code is written by AI agents following strict rules: a plan before starting, one commit per task, hundreds of tests that must end in PRUEBAS OK (tests passed), and screenshots checked from several angles.
This devlog covers each mod: what it does, how it was built and, above all, what went wrong along the way.
Latest
A tutorial that's a mod: Atalaya the owl and a first quest chosen by the other modsIn a new game an owl flies in, teaches you the basics in five steps and gives you your first quest. Which quest depends on the mods you have switched on.
An in-game photo camera in Godot 4: viewfinder, zoom, JPG files and measuring the framingIn Gotic you can pick up a camera, look through the viewfinder and take photos saved as JPGs in an album. The hard part wasn't the photo: it was knowing what's in it.
A bestiary you fill with photos: ten creatures, three stars and the perfect momentIn Gotic you don't catch creatures, you photograph them. Each has its own time of day, weather, way of fleeing, and a moment worth three stars.
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- A tutorial that's a mod: Atalaya the owl and a first quest chosen by the other modsIn a new game an owl flies in, teaches you the basics in five steps and gives you your first quest. Which quest depends on the mods you have switched on.
- An in-game photo camera in Godot 4: viewfinder, zoom, JPG files and measuring the framingIn Gotic you can pick up a camera, look through the viewfinder and take photos saved as JPGs in an album. The hard part wasn't the photo: it was knowing what's in it.
- A bestiary you fill with photos: ten creatures, three stars and the perfect momentIn Gotic you don't catch creatures, you photograph them. Each has its own time of day, weather, way of fleeing, and a moment worth three stars.
Friendship, gifts and requests without touching the villagers' code: a Godot mod that hooks into dialogueEleven villagers, five hearts each, one gift a day and a secret at three hearts. And the mod doesn't change a single line of the villages they live in.
A sprint boost with a stamina bar in Godot 4: threshold, grace period and stacking bonusesOne button that makes you 45 % faster on foot, swimming and on the broom, for as long as the bar lasts. It looked like the easiest feature in the game and still hid traps.
Treasure maps drawn from the real terrain in Godot 4: Captain Brea's huntA bottle on the beach holds a parchment with the coastline, contour lines and an X. Five chests, a compass in pieces and a parrot. The maps aren't hand-drawn: they come from the island's terrain.
A buoy time-trial regatta in Godot 4: detecting when you pass between two buoysEleven buoy gates in Caleta's lagoon and around the sandbar island, rowed against the clock. How to check you cross them in order and the right way, and how to set medal times without players.
A one-button fishing minigame in Godot 4, with ten speciesCast, strike when it bites and hold to keep the green zone on the fish. Ten species depending on water depth and time of day, and an old fisherman who hands you a better rod. Here's how I built it.
A night festival with a rhythm dance and fireworks in Godot 4On even nights, Brumacosta hangs up lanterns, the music starts and you dance round the bonfire to the drum. At midnight, fireworks that I had to rebuild because they weren't being drawn.
30 screen-space shaders in Godot 4 to choose my game's art stylePixel art, oil paint, stained glass, thermal camera, VHS… 30 shaders that change the look of Gotic's whole island without touching a single model. Compare them on the farm by day and at the festival by night.
A cow to milk and bees that need flowers: my farm's barn mod in GodotLucera gives milk every 5 minutes and, with affection, sometimes two bottles. The hives only make honey if at least three plots are planted. A small mod that hooks into the farm without changing it.
Cooking with what you fish and farm: 14 recipes that grant buffs in Godot 4A cauldron on every village bonfire: what you catch and grow becomes dishes that make you run, swim, jump or fly faster for a while. And the cooking mod doesn't know any other mod exists.
Rain, storms and rainbows in Godot 4 (and why not a single drop showed up)Showers that come and go, lightning and a rainbow when it clears. The first rain was invisible: the engine culled the whole emitter. How I fixed it with CPUParticles3D.
A rowing boat without a physics engine in Godot 4: rowing, running aground and landingA boat at the Caleta pier for rowing along the coast, landing on the sandbar island and fishing in open water. No real physics: it only checks water depth and the pier.
A sky-ring time trial in Godot 4, and how to tell you flew throughTen rings in the air, a broom and a clock. How I detect that you pass through each ring the right way, why the rings are opaque and where the medal times come from.
A progress journal that knows no mods: Gotic's island album in GodotPress J and see how much of the island you've done: fish, recipes, medals, friends and villages visited. The journal doesn't know which mods exist; it asks them.
Sheep that follow your footsteps: breadcrumb herding in Godot 4Three lost sheep, two wolves and a whistle. To get the flock around trees and fences without any pathfinding, the sheep step exactly where you stepped.
A* pathfinding over procedural terrain in Godot: Vega de Poniente, the vineyard townA town with vineyards and a wine press in the island's southwest, joined to Brumacosta by a 490 m road. The road was computed with A* outside the game and saved as constants.
A courier mod in Godot: delivering parcels between four towns, on foot or by broomEight chained parcels between the post offices of Gotic's four towns. There's a tip if you arrive in time, but the deadline is set so that walking won't make it.
Combat without death in Godot 4: shadows that warn before they chargeA lantern, three shadows that telegraph their attacks and a firefly that lets you glide. How I built Gotic's first quest with enemies where nobody can lose anything.
A Stardew Valley-style 3D farm in Godot 4: crops, watering and chickensTill, plant, water and harvest 18 plots, sell through the shipping box and raise chickens, tame or wild. How I built Gotic's Granja del Roble with crop rules in about 40 lines.
An 11-metre giant and his shockwaves: a jumping minigame in GodotBrum wanders a clearing ringed by standing stones. He stomps three times and a golden wave rolls across the ground: jump it or it clips you. Win, and he'll launch you into the sky.
Procedural wildlife in Godot 4: rabbits, deer and butterflies on a budgetButterflies, rabbits, deer and gulls around the player, placed with a fixed seed and no physics. The first version cost 8 ms per frame; here's how it got down to 2.1.
A gathering quest in Godot: Lía's breeze flowers and the flower crownGotic's first quest: pick three violet flowers for an infusion that makes you run 25% faster, and on the second delivery earn a flower crown you can see on your head.
A day–night cycle in Godot 4 with one light and shorter nightsA 16-minute day with orange sunsets, moon, stars and villages with their windows lit. A single light plays both sun and moon, and night passes faster on purpose.
A time-trial footrace in Godot: six gates, three medals and a bot that runs it with physicsThe relay race: six gates across the western meadow, a 65-second limit and gold at 38. A physics-driven autopilot finishes it in 40.73 s.
Caleta Salobre: a fishing village with a walkable pier in Godot 4The town on Gotic's east coast has a pier, moored boats and fish-drying racks. That pier ended up hosting the fishing, rowing boat and regatta mods.
A game built from mods in Godot 4: switch them on, off, or delete the folder without breaking anythingGotic is 31 mods you toggle from a menu and remove by deleting their folder. Keeping the game working was easy; keeping the test suite working was not.
Procedural ambient sound in Godot 4 that I still haven't heardFootsteps that change with the ground, swim strokes, birds, crickets, waves and wind, all synthesised in Python. The tests say nothing clips. Whether it sounds good, I don't know yet.
A town on top of a plateau: testing in Godot that the climb can be walkedAltomira sits 58 m up, at the end of a 713 m road. On a grid the climb looked gentle; measured metre by metre, it was right at the edge of what the character can walk up.
Brumacosta, my game's first village: a whole town generated in code with Godot 4Six houses, a market, a windmill, a campfire and villagers with daily routines, all generated in code. This is how Brumacosta was born, and how it became the template for every other town in Gotic.
A flying broom in Godot 4 that you steer with the cameraGotic's first mod was a broom to fly across the island: look up to climb, look down to dive, and it lands by itself. How it's built and what broke along the way.