Making a Video Game

 

These past few weeks, I've been working on a classic arcade-style space shooter called Kablasto. After many years of unfinished projects, this is the first one where I've made enough real progress to feel confident I'll actually see it through to completion.

Let's face it - burnout is the enemy.

Kablasto is fast, chaotic, and full of space things to shoot - because what else are you gonna do in space?

Building Kablasto: Tools of the Trade

This game is being built in Godot, which has been a great fit for this kind of big budget project. I’m using GDScript for all the game logic — signals, timers, player movement, shooting, asteroid spawning, boss battles, score tracking — the works.

I’ve probably rewritten parts of this game five times (or more), which is pretty much par for the course when you’re figuring it out as you go.

One of the more satisfying things has been learning how systems talk to each other properly — might be a bit late for Kablasto, but future titles, watch out. I’ve got the player emitting a signal on death, triggering a delayed respawn, and even the boss health bar animates smoothly when the fight kicks off. Every little piece feels like stitching this chaotic little world together.

The soundtrack for Kablasto is being composed with OpenMPT, an old-school tracker that lets me build music the retro way — one pattern at a time. The main theme is a Tango, but since this is a space shooter, it’s fused with gritty metal textures to give it some edge. It’s weird, intense, and somehow... it works.

You can hear samples of the soundtrack for free on my patreon (no subscription required).

Most of the sound effects - from laser blasts to explosions - were created in Audacity, chopped and tweaked to match the on screen chaos.

And finally, the visuals. For detailed sprites, I like to start with AI-generated images from Piclumen, then clean them up and polish them in GIMP. I’ve also used GIMP to create the animated explosions, frame by frame.

As for the bullets — they were modeled and rendered in Blender to give them a slightly 3D look, just enough to stand out during all the action.

The end result is a strange blend of tools and styles, but it’s all part of Kablasto’s charm.

Kablasto has been a wild ride so far — a personal milestone and a technical workout. It’s not perfect, but then again, maybe it is, and it’s getting closer to the finish line every day.

If you’ve enjoyed this little peek behind the curtain, stay tuned. I’ll be posting more updates as I polish things up, squash bugs, and get Kablasto ready for the world. In the meantime, feel free to check out the music on my Patreon and follow along as I (finally) finish a game.