Last spring I taught a Global Video Game course and experimented with Godot for a game design and development assignment. My colleague, Casey Puccini, and I never used Godot game engine before. It was quite a trip for both us and the students as we did not anticipate the level of learning curve demanded by Godot. All in all, it was still a good experience. I would like to thank my students who persevered until the end of the semester learning how to develop a game using Godot with virtually no background in game design or development. They started (as usual) with an ideal project, but had to pivot to a more realistic approach. Most of their projects ended up as reskins of Godot game templates. One of the groups did manage to develop an original game though. It’s a maze puzzle game about game piracy called Bytebreaker. Casey and I were quite impressed with it and I think I am going to use it as a model for the next iteration of the course in spring 2025.
Below is the description of the game:
Bytebreaker explores the dynamic of piracy of popular video games in the global south. By creating a game that highlights this concept, ByteBreaker strives to bring attention to the issue of piracy and issues of inequality in video games by emphasizing the difference in access between consumers in the global north versus the global south.
ByteBreaker is a single-player, first person POV game. The goal of the game is to move throughout the network-like maze and collect all the games on each level. The games to collect are carefully curated as they represent the most pirated games by people in the global south regions.
This game is created and developed as part of an assignment in the Global Video Games course at HWS in Spring 2024.
Developers:
Cullen Beck ’25, Zach Manuel ’24, Laurens Van Alen ’24, Emma Kirts ’24, and Julia Kunzelmann ’24
You can play the game on Itch.io by following this link.