God of Thunder 3D

What is it?

This is a 3D remake on PC of the first episode of the old DOS PC shareware game God of Thunder in Godot (to learn how Godot works) and have a bit of fun converting a 2D game to 3D.

God Of Thunder DOS

Concept

I always enjoyed this shareware game back in the 90s. It was a really cool Zelda-like action adventure game with some puzzles. I wanted to learn some deeper parts of the Godot engine and actual complete a project using it, and I wanted to create something in the style of 3D Dot Game Heroes so I put two and two together and GOT3D is the outcome.

Differences

Obviously there's a few changes in the jump to 3D. I've tried to keep as much of the original gameplay as it was and used all the same text, sfx and music from the original games, but here's a few changes in the new version.

• Everything is 3D now.
• No level changes/screen swaps, everything that should be in view, is in view.
• Added support for game controllers (with icons to match your controller where possible).
• Automatic saving between exterior/interior location changes.
• Basic save profile system for multiple users to play.
• Render scaling options (4K+ hardware permitting).
• Some changes to the objects you can move, they do not reset on death but can be destroyed to reset to their original positions if you make a mistake.
• The game is little bit easier than the original.

There are only three things from the original I didn't include (yet?) which are...

• I haven't included the cave bats because now having a real Y-axis means you would need to throw the hammer upwards which makes things overly complex.
• There's no flying birds that drop the eggs on you, that only appeared in one screen in the original.
• I didn't include the falling stalactites in the caves as there's technically no visible ceiling in the new 3D cave sections to warn you they might be there to fall.

Hardware

The game should run on modest hardware. I used the Mobile rendering pipeline which hopefully keeps everything as smooth as possible on a recent-ish PC. If you suffer from any slow down, you can either lower the internal rendering resolution using the scaling options or turn off the depth of field effect which can be quite expensive on some lower end hardware. You do need a graphics card/chip that has the latest drivers and supports Vulkan.

Conclusion

This has been a spare-time hobby project to get something released using Godot and learning how it all works from start to finish. Very happy with this final build, there's always some parts that could be better but I think it turned out as good as I'd hoped. I'm looking to do a Steam (+deck) build with some achievements plugged in to look at the Steam API for future projects. 

Thanks to all the creators and their assets I've used to fill in my bad art skills. Massive thanks to Gareth West and Sergio de Prado for their QA and feedback during development. Lots of love to my family for letting me disappear and make this. Last but not least thanks to the original development team for making God of Thunder DOS (which you can play on Steam or ScummVM now).

Steam

Videos

Check out this YT playthrough by dosgamert *SPOILERS* obviously if you haven't played it.