Excited to put out my first Godot project, FARO:198X. Initially started as a way to learn and experiment with new ideas, I found myself really enjoying this project and wanted to see it through to a releasable state.  

The biggest challenge (aside from learning a new game engine) was trying to think of how to reimagine Faro as a singleplayer experience. This was incredibly challenging and I’m honestly still not sure I figured it out. I knew I wanted to keep the mechanics the same (put tokens on what you believe will be the winning card) but after trying that out for a while it really felt like a game of ‘guess what number is next’ which didn’t feel very rewarding. I wanted to give players a chance to feel like they had agency over the outcome. This led to the powerup system, an attempt at recreating how the original game of Faro gave players agency through cheating!  

I think the system currently as a concept could work - meaning that higher skill players should be able to consistently outscore lower skill players. There is still a high degree of luck, but it should be offset enough that good players will, on average, outscore bad players.  

Another large part of this project was practicing ‘juice’. An area of game development I largely ignored in the past, I found myself really clicking with Godot’s approach to shaders and creating effects. Where the game may fall short in content, I hope it makes up for in visual design! 

Speaking on content, originally I wanted to implement a lot more powerups and a difficulty/metagame system (note the target text in the top left of the game). I might come back to implement these ideas in the future, but for now the project will be on pause as I continue to learn the Godot engine.

Anyway, thanks for taking the time to read my quick thoughts on FARO:198X and I hope you enjoy checking it out! I’m always very appreciative of feedback and critique, so feel free to contact me at any time! Oh and my current high score is 7496, I think that's pretty good.