Solo Dev on Making a Hand-Painted Hard Sci-Fi Adventure in Godot

Introduction

Hi! My name is Nikita. During the day, I'm a scientist and study cells in a lab. In the evenings, I study aliens. Mayak is my first game. A game I haven't actually finished yet. When I started making Mayak, music was the easiest part for me. Before gamedev, I spent around 15 years making music under the name Nicephorus: Spotify. A lot of old sketches, recorded samples, and musical ideas that had been piling up for years are now slowly moving into Mayak.

I could draw a little too. I went to art school as a kid. But I had never tried programming, building game scenes, or writing a story before. So I started in a pretty chaotic way. First I came up with the genre and the story. Then I just started drawing scenes. At the same time, I watched Godot tutorials, tried different engines — 2D, 3D, 2.5D — hit dead ends, redid everything, started again.

For about a year, nothing really came together. And then at some point, bam. I assembled another scene, the drawings started moving, there was light, sound, music, parallax. And I thought: that's it. This works.

Core Gameplay Mechanics

Mayak is a linear, story-driven sci-fi game, around 4 hours long. Structurally, it's a hybrid between an adventure game and a visual novel. Sometimes you walk through scenes, interact with the environment, and explore things. Sometimes it becomes almost a pure VN.

At the center of the story are a young astronomer, Nina (Hi Nina), Isaac the cat, and a signal from another star. The signal looks like this:

3571

3559

3557
...

All the numbers are prime. And they're counting down. In short: someone very far away is trying to say something. Then comes the problem of first contact. And what comes next is spoilers. So I won't say much more.

There will be space, contact, the unknown, hard sci-fi, and quite a lot of strange things. But for me, Mayak is not really about space as much as it is about people facing huge cosmic events. If I had to describe it very briefly: space sci-fi and love. And a cat. The cat is important.

Inspirations

I spent about a year looking for the visual style. I drew a lot. Tried 3D. Tried 2.5D. Played with lighting. I even experimented with AI tools at one point, but I hated the results and dropped that direction. And at some point I thought: I already have my own weird, slightly crooked style. It's mine.

There are so many perfectly polished illustrations everywhere now, and half the time people are arguing about whether a human made them or AI did. So maybe it's better to just trust my own crookedness and let it loose? And after that thought, somehow the drawing started to work.

I love oil painting, Impressionism, rough brush strokes, manga, noir, very dark colors, and bright light. And I especially love when all of that starts moving.

Now I draw every scene by hand, split it into many layers, and assemble it again inside the engine. Sometimes I can make two or three scenes in a week. Actually, no. More like one or two. I don't know. Everything is very slow. And the best part is that almost every scene in the game is unique and never appears again. At some point I realized I had built a trap for myself. I don't recommend this approach to anyone.

As for hard sci-fi, I've always loved science fiction that takes the "science" part seriously. I've been listening to sci-fi audiobooks almost every day for about 17 years now. Somehow I'm still not tired of it! Of course, Mayak is fiction. There will be assumptions. Some of them are pretty big. But I want the universe inside the game to be logical.

I want players to finish the game and think something like: "Yeah. Maybe if humanity really received 3571 from space one day, things could have happened this way." And what real scientific concepts is the story based on? This is where I gracefully avoid the question. If I start listing them in too much detail, I'll basically start spoiling the mysteries of the game.

Development Process

This was one of the biggest discoveries for me during development. Mayak is real 2D. Not 2D sprites placed in a 3D world. Not some hidden 3D scene. Just 2D. For experienced developers, this probably sounds funny, but I really had no idea how much life you can add to a completely flat drawing.

First, I split it into layers. Foreground. Characters. Walls. Windows. Sky. Some completely unnecessary bushes that I spent two hours drawing for some reason. Then I added parallax.

Then light. The light is already painted into the artwork, but on top of that I can add actual 2D light sources and shadows. For example, here a character with a chemical glow stick walks past a tree. The tree lights up and casts a shadow. It's a tiny thing. But I get a ridiculous amount of joy from using light on a flat 2D plane.

Then there are shaders. I try to use them pretty carefully: slight shaking, movement in the painted surface, small distortions, semi-transparent flickering textures over the original artwork. All of this is done with shaders that are actually pretty simple. 

And then sound comes in. Room noise. Wind. Machinery humming. Footsteps. Music. Unfortunately, GIFs can't show that part. But for me, this is where the real magic starts. I really like Godot. It's insanely cool. It's lightweight, starts fast, and it feels almost limitless. At the beginning, I tried some engines that looked easier for beginners.

But sooner or later I hit a wall when I wanted to add lots of parallax layers, animated speech bubbles, or more complicated shaders. In Godot, my hands are basically untied. I have quite a few small custom systems: dialogues (special thanks to the creator of the DialogueManager plugin for Godot, you're awesome!), scenes, parallax, transitions, image handling, shaders, lighting.

But I wouldn't call any of this a great engineering achievement. Everything was invented before me. I'm just assembling the pieces in the way I like.

Probably the biggest technical challenge in Mayak is the huge amount of artwork. I draw large scenes; they have many layers, and then there are effects, lighting, and shaders on top. At some point, I realized that my romantic idea of "every scene should be unique" has a very specific price: time. I have to draw. A lot.

Only One Ending

It has only one ending because I love linear stories. When a game has many endings, I finish one, then go to YouTube to watch the others, then search online to find out which ending is canon. And at some point I stop understanding what the author actually wanted to say with the story.

This is completely my own problem. I'm not criticizing games with choices at all. I just decided to make my own game the way I personally like it. One story. One strong ending. Sometimes I just want to relax and sink into a story without having heavy moral choices sitting on my conscience. Let the characters deal with those. I hope there are enough people like me.

Current Process

There is a free demo out now, around 30–40 minutes long. The full game will be around four hours, very approximately. The script is already written. Now there's just one tiny detail left: making the game. The reaction to the demo has been very warm so far, and it helps a lot. Especially because I spent a long time making Mayak almost in a vacuum.

You sit at home in the evening, spend three days drawing some wall, and have absolutely no idea if anyone in the world needs this wall except you. Then someone from another country writes that they finished the demo and liked the atmosphere, or the music, or the cat. And you think: okay. Let's draw the next wall.

I also do most of the marketing myself. I'm a solo developer, so I don't have a marketing budget or a PR department. I just tried to slowly show Mayak wherever I could. Festivals, smaller showcases, Reddit (thanks for the ban), social media, emails to journalists and creators.

Recently I also started trying the Chinese platform HeyBox. Registering there as a foreign developer turned into a small narrative game of its own, with four stages of verification. But eventually I made my first post for Chinese players, and the response was unexpectedly warm. The biggest wishlist jumps usually came after festivals and showcases: Wishlisted, Convergence, Six One Indie, Nashy Games, and others. I'm endlessly grateful to all of them!

Actually, in a few days it will be exactly one year since Mayak got its first wishlist. Right now, in August 2026, it's at around 17.5k wishlists. Not a super hit, but a year ago I couldn't even imagine having that number.

Advice to Beginner Developers

These are mostly things I would tell myself. I'm not a professional, and they may be completely wrong for another developer with different goals:

• Have a unique visual style. It should have style.
• Maybe the game should be small. I completely ignored this advice.
• Don't wait until you "know how to make games." I started with zero game dev experience. I just drew scenes and watched Godot tutorials at the same time. At some point, the separate pieces started connecting.

That's probably my main advice. Make something small, but stylish. Then make another thing. At some point, suddenly, you'll have a game. And other people may even become interested in it. Or you'll have a gigantic folder full of PNGs. That's cool too.

Nikita Nplus1, Game Developer of Mayak

Interview conducted by Amber Rutherford