Harold Voidskipper

top down, twin-stick action combat game

About the Project

Harold Voidskipper is an action game with bullet hell elements. I was inspired by twin-stick shooters like Enter the Gungeon and action games like Furi to make this game.

It was made during Harold Jam 2024, a mostly RPGMaker-themed jam but which did accept other engines if the games fit the jam’s theme.

Features

  • Cute pixel art for characters and environments
  • Chiptune music from great artists at OpenGameArt
  • Smooth and responsive controls, including controller support
  • Language support for English and Brazillian Portuguese.

Development Tools

The game was made in Godot 4.2, with the Dialogic plugin. I also used BFXR and Audacity for sound effects and audio balancing.

Development Process

Harold Jam is hosted by a few friends of mine so I was really excited to participate this year, but with work on Drifty and some heavy uni assignments I had to play my cards well or burn out trying. One week into the jam, I had the idea to take the code from another jam game, Queen Slayer, and just add more content to it.

It was a good call, I could focus more on visuals and programming the bullets as the entire wave system and damage systems were already done. Still, I thought I had time to add unique minibosses between levels, but as I focused on getting the final boss working right, I ended up just making reskins of the basic enemies to fill in time.

Future Plans

I’ve received feedback from a lot of colleagues during the jam that the game is polished enough they could see it being sold, which gave me a wave of confidence. The code framework I’m using for combat has been slowly evolving for the past year or two and Voidskipper is the culmination of that work.

As such, I definitely have a GDD backed up with how I could morph this into a Steam game, with actual progression and replayability, as well as some tweaks to the framework I need to make before getting there. If something is holding me back it’s mostly figuring out a marketing plan for such a small game and balancing dev time with university time.


Gameplay with commentary from streamer HawkZombie, during the jam.

Download

You can find Harold Voidskipper over on Itch.io.