Players Might Be Able to Leave Graffiti on Walls in This WIP Godot Game
"The cake is a lie."
Do you remember the eerie messages scrawled on the walls in Portal 2 – like shaky arrows pointing to an exit, "She's watching you," and, of course, the legendary "The cake is a lie"? In the WIP game by developer Kovalev, players might be able to leave wall messages themselves, and other users will see them in their gameplay sessions.
In the developer's singleplayer roguelite minesweeper, players try to get out of a dungeon, and each round is a few minesweeper fields on a timer. As players progress through the game, they can add scrawlings on the walls, reassuring or confusing other users, or just entertaining everyone with some funny sketches.
The developer explained the setup behind the peculiar graffiti feature:
"How it works:
- There's a canvas in the "safe" room. The tool is as simple as it gets: a 50x50 grid, two colours.
- When you leave the tool, the drawing goes to the backend as a mask over HTTP and gets stored in the DB.
- The mask is 625 bytes, around 836 in base64. Only changed and non-empty drawings get sent.
- On game start, 10 random drawings come back from the DB. They appear on the walls as you move through the dungeon.
- When the pool drops to three, the game fetches enough new drawings to bring it back up to ten."
Of course, moderation is a necessary part of the system. According to Kovalev, every mask in the database has one of the three statuses: pending, approved, or rejected, and players only see the approved ones. Right now, moderation runs through a local HTML tool where Kovalev goes through drawings one by one. It's slow once there are thousands of drawings, but the developer is working on the feature, and further enhancements are likely on the roadmap.
Kovalev is also contemplating whether players should be asked upfront if they're comfortable seeing and sharing this kind of content. It hasn't been implemented yet, but the developer plans to address it in the future.
If you're into development with the Godot engine, take a look at this cool tutorial on creating realistic water with dynamic foam by Emil J and Nando's fantastic recreation of a see-through-walls effect from Baldur's Gate 3:
GodotGameLab has over 50 hours of free tutorials, with which you can build a Slay the Spire-style deckbuilder and a TFT-style autobattler:
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