The Great Escape Play

Made with Godot & GDScript for the GameDev.tv Game Jam 2024

The Great Escape is a tactical RPG, inspired by games like Final Fantasy Tactics and the Fire Emblem series, where you make a last stand (which was the theme of the game jam) against an invading imperial force in order to give the villagers who are fleeing enough time to escape. In the original concept for the game, you were defending a port as a boat attempted to escape, and there would be a timer until the boat was sufficiently far enough to have ‘escaped’, after which you had completed the objective but could continue to try and last against waves of enemies for as long as possible. Unfortunately, this concept was not fully realised within the game jam due to time constraints, however I did implement a working turn based battle system with a grid, including movement, attacks, healing, and impassable tiles. I did still convey some of the original idea behind the story for the game through a cutscene at the beginning, which I implemented a basic dialogue system for, and my brother designed unique sprites for each of the player’s units to give them their own personalities, compared to the more uniform appearance of the enemy imperial units. Trying to settle on a control scheme was difficult, initial prototypes were mouse controlled, but this was replaced with keyboard controls to align with other tactics games which were primarily released on consoles. The control scheme was the main area of feedback after the game jam, so different schemes and customisation are being considered for a post-game jam update which is in the works. The update hopes to realise the parts of the idea that were not finished in time, such as having an ability system, improved enemy AI, endless waves of enemy units, improved controls and more story.

The Great Escape was the first game I made using Godot that wasn’t just following a tutorial, as well as the first time I have experimented with RPG elements, turn-based combat, dialogue scripting, or complex menuing in a game. This meant that I ended up learning quite a lot while working on the project, since I ran into various difficulties when attempting to implement these systems for the first time. Two features of Godot that I ended up making substantial use of that I had not realised how useful they could be were Resources and Tilemaps. Overall I had a lot of fun working on this entry, even though it was quite difficult, and the GameDev.tv jam being 10 days long made it a bit easier to learn more about Godot while working on the game rather than being stressed about getting something done before the deadline. I will definitely keep learning about and experimenting with Godot, since I found it a lot more fun to work with than Unity, as well as being significantly lighter weight and more stable.