Gameplay and systems programmer

OUTLAWSTARZ

I make multiplayer games in Godot. Card games, party games, co-op horror, and whatever idea will not leave me alone that month.

See the games dev@outlawstarz.com

01 The two big ones

A duel in progress at a table in the mall

Two players duelling at a table, units standing as holograms on the board between them

The card shop mall, lit and lined with duel tables

Flagship, in alpha

Under One Banner

A trading card game you play by walking up to the table.

You make a character and wander around a card shop mall. Want a pack, walk into the shop and buy one. Want a game, find somebody sitting at a duel table and take the seat across from them. The cards come up as holograms on the wood between you, and anyone walking past can stop and watch the whole thing.

Decks are built around nations, and every deck has a leader sitting behind five Shards. Damage that gets past your board chews through those instead, and each one that breaks hands you resources back. Being on the back foot is where most of the good comebacks start, which is the part I care about most.

Packs come from playing. Money only ever buys cosmetics, so nobody buys their way to a better deck. There is a ranked ladder with its own hall upstairs, and ranked matches run on a proper server rather than on somebody's PC.

Scope: 154 cards, six starter decks, four nations
Status: In alpha and playable, updated most weeks
Team: Just me

itch.io page mothcoatgames.com

A duck standing under a cherry blossom tree in the Cherry Grove arena

Multiplayer party game

Duck Duck Grenade

Hot potato with a fuse nobody can see.

Everyone messes about in a pond until the round starts, then you all get dropped into an arena and one duck gets handed a live grenade. The fuse is random every time. You get rid of it by waddling into somebody else.

The catch is that passing it freezes whoever catches it for a second and gives you a speed boost on the way out. So you cannot just bounce it back and forth with the nearest player until it goes off. Somebody has to actually run.

Blow up and you come back as a ghost duck. Ghosts fly, and they get their own toys for ruining everyone's day: a gust of wind to shove a duck back into the blast, a scream, a decoy that looks like a real player, a slime puddle to slip on. Getting knocked out does not put you on the bench, it just changes what you are playing.

Scope: Four arenas, water you can swim in, up to three live grenades
Status: Playable. Host a lobby and invite friends through Steam
Team: Just me

02 Six prototypes

Smaller things I built to find out whether an idea was any fun. Some run start to finish, some stop halfway. None of them are finished games.

Tumble, the wolf dog companion, standing in a clearing

Project Wild Companion

A cosy first person forage and cook game where you live at the edge of a forest with a wolf dog. Closest thing to it is Hey You, Pikachu!, with a day cycle and a cooking pot.

The dog is not a pet that trails behind you. It has hunger, energy and curiosity, and it does whatever is winning at that moment. Point it at a rabbit and it might go, or it might have found something better to smell. You give it directions and eyes on the far side of a clearing, it gives you a nose and the speed to actually catch things.

Godot 4
Day and night cycle
Foraging and cooking

A first person view of a saw trap firing across a corridor

DeathRun

The old Counter-Strike and Garry's Mod deathrun mod, rebuilt properly. One player is the trap operator looking down at the course, everyone else is running it in first person.

Saws, spike walls, floor drops. Each trap only fires once a round, so the operator has to spend them rather than spam them. The fun is in the bluff: let a runner get comfortable, wait for the sprint, then drop the floor out. Die and you go free fly spectator for the rest of the round, which is where most of the shouting happens.

Godot 4
First person parkour
One life a round

A twelve by twelve tactical grid with four heroes, cover blocks and movement range highlighted

Crypt Command

XCOM shrunk down to a 12 by 12 crypt. Four heroes, two actions each, cover, overwatch, permadeath, and a necromancer at the far end you have to reach.

The wrinkle is the bodies. Every skeleton you put down leaves a corpse that stands back up two turns later unless somebody stops and destroys it, and the necromancer raises one more anywhere on the map every turn. You are constantly choosing between pushing him and tidying up behind you. Between runs you hire and level people in a warband hall, and anyone who dies out there is gone for good.

Godot 4
Turn based tactics
Permadeath

A party of three mid battle with a Spherechange Chain of three showing

Jobsphere

A JRPG built around Final Fantasy X-2's dressphere system. Three heroes, turn gauges filling in real time, and four jobs you can swap between in the middle of a fight.

Switching burns about 40 percent of your gauge, so it always costs you a turn you could have spent hitting something. Switch again before the chain drops and your damage climbs, and three in a row buys somebody a free cast. The boss flips between an iron stance and a warded one, so parking in one job and mashing attack stops working almost immediately.

Godot 4
Real time turn gauges
Four jobs

The lobby threat assessment screen reading OVERRUN at eight investigators

Coldspot

Phasmophobia, except bringing more friends makes it worse instead of safer. One to eight investigators, seven kinds of evidence, eight kinds of entity, and a van to run back to.

Solo, the equipment tells you the truth. Bring a full crew and the thing is more active, hunts run longer, sanity drains quicker, and about a fifth of your readings are simply lies. At five players one of its three evidence types stops showing up at all, so the only way to name it is to stop trusting the gear and watch how it moves.

Godot 4
Up to 8 players
Procedural houses

Gravehaul

Four idiots robbing a graveyard before sunrise. Same lane as Moving Out and Chained Together: the coffins and the bodies are real physics objects, and most of them are too heavy for one person.

So you and a friend end up carrying one coffin between you, pulling in different directions, and that is the whole joke. Every crash and dropped lid wakes something else up, and the more noise you make the more the groundskeeper and the grave hands come looking. Cursed loot sticks to whoever grabs it first and nobody else can see which one you got, so the guy suddenly walking backwards has some explaining to do. Get caught and you are locked in a shed until somebody comes to let you out.

Godot 4
Shared physics carrying
Four player co-op

Still graybox, so there is nothing here worth showing you yet.

03 About

I am a solo developer, and I have spent the last few years making games in Godot. They usually end up multiplayer, because the games I keep coming back to are the ones you play with other people.

Most of how I work is building a small version of an idea and finding out quickly whether it is any fun. That is what the prototypes up there are. The ones that hold up get the real work, which is where Under One Banner came from. It is the one I have kept going longest and it is in alpha now.

The design, the code and most of the art on this page is mine. What I want next is to be doing this with other people: gameplay or systems work, or a bit of everything at a small studio.

Want to talk?

dev@outlawstarz.com

itch.io/outlawstarz github.com/outlawstarz