Buckshot Roulette Developer Discusses Benefits of Godot for His Latest Game
Mike Klubnika's hacking simulator is even more mysterious than his previous game.
Mike Klubnika is a solo developer whose Buckshot Roulette you've definitely at least heard about. It was all over YouTube, with famous creators releasing walkthroughs every day at some point. Klubnika's latest game, s.p.l.i.t, is quite different from Buckshot Roulette: it's not that easy for the creator to explain, but it's a "hacking simulator with 'Typing of The Dead' elements, and a bunch of existential horror."
In an interview with Godot, he shared that the title was born from his desire to do something more narrative-heavy after his hit project was done.
"For the gameplay side I tried to have somewhat 'realistic' hacking, so the terminal is very barebones with no flashy visuals, and the game uses commands that players would hopefully already be familiar with."
Mike Klubnika
s.p.l.i.t relies on keyboard only, and it was not easy to figure out how the player can navigate. The biggest challenge, Klubnika says, was "having the game be at least somewhat accessible to people who haven’t touched a command line before."
"Originally the terminal puzzles in the game were designed so that the end goal was clear, but the path there wasn’t. Players ended up being left in the dark, so making the steps to the goal clearer helped a lot. The puzzles ended up in a place where the player would have a pretty clear outline of a goal, and have to translate the steps to fulfill that into terminal commands."
Mike Klubnika
The game is powered by Godot, chosen by the developer after Unity's infamous Runtime Fee. He likes its speed and the fact that it's open source and easy to get into but would love to be able to see a real-time visualization of the remote scene tree in the editor.
"My favourite feature has to be the AnimationPlayer, which is very powerful and quick to set up. Coming from C#, I also liked GDscript once I got used to it. I think it’s a very nice programming language. Generally though I feel like it’s super quick to iterate on features — there’s not a lot of friction in experimenting or tweaking small things."
The interview covers some points we asked Klubnika in our own interview last year, so if you want to learn more about his experience, be sure to check it out.
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