Panagiotis Tsiapkolis

Route 404

Context

I made this game during the Nuit de l'Info 2017, an hackathon where we only had one evening to make projects to take up challenges issued by businesses, while taking note of the night's theme.

The challenge this was submitted to was to make "the most original error 404 page", and the night's theme was "road safety". We actually won that challenge, which allowed me to buy a few controllers to invite friends over for some good old couch coop.

Design and Technical Details

I did the whole game, programming and graphics, while taking input from the rest of the team. I choose Godot because of its web export abilities, and because I like how it works.

The game emerged from a simple idea : what if you made stupid road code questions and could see the results ? The game would start with obvious questions and simple outcomes, but would then have you street race spectacularly and finally die, because street racing is unsafe.

Since the gameplay is only choosing an answer to a question, and then seeing what happens, the game only needs to play animations. My friends called it a visual novel, which is technically correct. I used the Godot animation system, which is pretty advanced and allowed me to iterate faster, while also being able to animate sound. This definitely sped up development.

The graphical style emerged from the themes and limitations, and works quite well in my opinion.

Overall, I am quite proud of this game, it is pretty good in what it intends to do in the short timespan it had available.

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