Turret Terror

All Bark, No Byte consists of Darcy Loane-Billings, Catherine Zhu and Daniela Villamizar Useche.

GitHub repo: https://github.com/DudeNamedDarcy/ConUHacks2025

DevPost for ConUHacks IX: https://devpost.com/software/turret-terror

Inspiration

We took inspiration from top-down 1v1 shooter player games as well as cooperative games. Although Turret terror has close to no cooperation, its controls are inspired by local cooperative game. We went for a space theme because of nostalgia for retro arcade games.

What it does

Helpful for the fellows that plan hangouts without planning activities, this is a simple two-player game that forces players to interact in person again. We mixed it up a little by allowing friendly fire, thus allowing some form of strategy.

How Did We Build It?

The game was made using the Godot game engine (version 4.3) and we used its custom, Python-like language, GDscript, to make it. We're all relatively new so we relied a lot on online teaching for this hackathon (Brackeys, GDQuest, etc.).

Challenges We Ran Into

The primary challenge we ran into making this game was shooting. Our game is a two-players-on-one-keyboard game so the shoot function had to be mapped to a button, not to the mouse. Positioning the bullet to where the front of the ship is pointing to ended up being a huge complication that all of us couldn't seem to solve. We could have used controllers, but none of us brought any controllers and using gamepad input probably would've led to a lot more problems.

Accomplishments That We're Proud Of

To be honest, we're just proud of ourselves for making a functioning demo. We learned a lot and made something in just 24 hours and that's all that matters. With that said, the most satisfying accomplishments were easily solving the healthbar and the basic movement. The healthbar used some nodes improperly and calling functions from it seemed like an impossibility. But thanks to Catherine's resilience, the issues were fixed overnight and the healthbar has been linked to the player and its damage. Movement of the ships was also done by the people newer to Godot to understanding Vector2s and forces was a challenge at the start of the hackathon but they learned a lot and were able to get the movement working after a couple of hours.

What We Learned

Way too much. Two of us went into this completely new to game design, Godot and GDScript so we all learned a ton of concepts.

What's next for Turret Terror?

If we were to continue updating it, an audio overhaul would be a great place to start, along with adding tween animations and custom fonts to stylize the game and to make it prettier. Perhaps adding a mode that has random events happen (an idea that we had earlier on but never implemented) such as faster bullets or slower ships, could be added in the future!