The game I have been working on since beginning of 2024. Amy’s World is both a predecessor (story-wise) and a successor (implementation-wise) to Amy Shifts Gears. In a nutshell, this is going to a deckbuilding card & dice adventure game with a focus on exploration and narrative.

While working on my UE5 Amy title, it became clear to me that I wanted to tell more of the world Amy lives in, and also have a flexible narrative structure. I wanted more “systemic” gameplay, rather than classic adventure game puzzles. There would be an emphasis on world exploration, demanding a different visual style. The workload needed to be manageable for my one-man operation, too.

Eventually, I decided to implement the game in Godot 4 (and GDScript, which I learned to love), with a 2.5D approach.

As I am still working on it, this is all very much in flux. Some technical highlights of the story so far:

• The title screen is a combined 2D & 3D animation, utilizing Blender’s Grease Pencil tool. Amy is the only actual 3D object in the scene! A toon shader and the LineArt modifier help to get a consistent look.

• The map structure, placement of encountered items, and NPCs are procedurally generated from a text-based story file. A dependency system ensures that items required for solving puzzles are always reachable.

• The map generation algorithm is pretty nifty by now. It uses distances to roads, noise maps, and an occupation grid to ensure collision-free and meaningful placement of houses, grass, NPCs, items, etc. I also use raycasts to the camera to guarantee important items aren’t covered by bushes, etc. This screenshot is old, you can still see the node-edge-structure of the underlying road map: