Devlog #1

LiftOff is a Godot 4 remake of an old Korean block-coding idle rocket game I used to play. Fuel charges over time, you launch a 3-stage rocket, altitude turns into money, money buys upgrades. This is my first Godot project, and this log covers up to the first actual flight.

the brain

I started with global.gd as an autoload before any scene existed. It holds credits, gems, upgrade levels, rebirth multipliers, highscores, and save/load. The 24 planet milestones are ported from the original game’s actual numbers, Mercury at 10K up to the Black Hole at 350e21. Upgrade cost is base × 1.8^level and there’s a formatter that goes K, M, B, T then aa, ab.

Almost shipped a save-eater here. I wrote next_plant instead of next_planet in the load function. Saving worked, loading silently didn’t, so planet progress reset every launch and unlock gems would have duplicated forever. No error anywhere. Caught it while re-reading the code before moving on.

assets

I couldn’t find the asset I used previously, so I recreated it.

fighting the editor

My Godot is in Korean and I kept being told to click menus that didn’t exist. Worst one: I spent way too long right-clicking Title.tscn in the FileSystem dock looking for “attach script”. It was never going to be there — scripts attach to nodes, and nodes live in the Scene panel. Different panel, different menu. I also dragged the script file onto the node and it just asked where to move the file.

Then the save dialog. I named the root node Title so the save dialog suggested Title.tscn, capital T, at the project root. The code wants scenes/title.tscn lowercase. Linux cares about that difference. Deleted it, rebuilt, saved properly.

the rocket moves 9 pixels

The main loop works. Fuel charges, LAUNCH burns three stages, touchdown pays out. But the rocket wasn’t moving, which scared me until I did the math: the visual offset is altitude × 0.0004, and a whole first flight tops out around 22.3K meters, so the rocket moves about nine pixels. Total. It’s fine. The altitude number going up is the game right now; actual motion comes from scrolling backgrounds in the art pass.

next up

Three minigames: Ignition Timing (from the original’s launch gauge), Starhop (slingshot between islands), Meteor Intercept (shoot down falling rocks). Hopefully with fewer wrong menus.