Gameplay and systems programmer

OUTLAWSTARZ

I build games in Godot. Mostly multiplayer, mostly the systems underneath: netcode, deterministic rules engines, AI you can actually inspect while it runs.

37,717lines in the flagship
10,000games per determinism check
8projects on this page

See the games outlawstarz.dev@gmail.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 3D trading card game where the menus are places.

You make an avatar and walk around a card shop mall. Buying packs means walking into the shop. Duelling means sitting down at a table with somebody, and the cards come out as holograms on the wood between you. There is no deck screen you get teleported to.

The rules engine underneath is plain GDScript with nothing from the engine in it, so the same code runs in the client and on a headless server. A self play harness runs ten thousand games and checks that every seed lands on the same result every time. That gate has to pass before anything ships.

The economy is server authoritative through Supabase, so the client never gets to decide what you own. Ranked runs on a dedicated duel server with Elo. There are 154 cards and six starter decks, and deckbuilding is built around nations and a leader with five protective Shards, which is where most of the comeback drama comes from.

Built with: Godot 4, GDScript, Supabase, Steamworks
State: 0.14.3-alpha, 223 commits, shipping through a launcher I wrote
My part: All of it

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, musical chairs and freeze tag, played by ducks.

Everyone hangs around a pond, then gets pulled into an arena and one duck is handed a grenade. The fuse is random and nobody can see it. You pass it by touching another duck.

The rule that makes it work: passing freezes whoever receives it for a moment and speeds up whoever passed. Without that, two players just bounce the grenade between each other until it goes off and nothing interesting happens.

When you die you become a ghost duck. Ghosts fly, and they get a kit for making life worse for the living: a gust of wind, a scream, a decoy, a slime puddle. Being out of the round is still something to do, which is the part most elimination games get wrong.

Built with: Godot 4, GodotSteam, buoyancy and swimming
State: Playable. Steam host, invite and join tested end to end
Scope: Four arenas, up to three live grenades, per duck abilities

02 Six prototypes

Each of these was built to answer one question, and stopped once it had an answer. None of them are finished games and I am not going to pretend otherwise. The question is the part worth reading.

Tumble, the wolf dog companion, standing in a clearing

Project Wild Companion

You live next to a forest with a wolf dog. You forage and cook, it hunts and retrieves, and the day cycles.

The question. Does the companion read as an animal with its own opinions, or as a tool that obeys?

Press F1 and every intent score is on screen. When it refuses you, you can see exactly which drive won.

Godot 4
Utility AI
72 assertion smoke test

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

DeathRun

One player fires traps down a fixed course while the others try to parkour through it. Stand in a live trap and you are gone.

The question. Can a scripted opponent and a real networked player go down the exact same code path?

They do. Swapping one controller class turns the AI operator into a human one, and the server cannot tell them apart. Ten authority rules, checked by a linter generated from a manifest.

Godot 4
ENet
Server authority

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

Crypt Command

Four heroes against a necromancer on a 12 by 12 grid. Cover, overwatch, permadeath, and a hall you recruit from between runs.

The question. What does cover and permadeath tactics feel like with a clock running on it?

Every skeleton you kill leaves a corpse that stands back up two turns later unless somebody spends an action on it. So you are always choosing between pushing the boss and cleaning up behind you.

Godot 4
AStar grid
Interrupting overwatch

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

Jobsphere

A JRPG where the thing you actually do is change class in the middle of a fight, while the turn gauges keep filling.

The question. If switching costs about 40 percent of your gauge, when is it worth doing?

Chaining switches raises your damage and eventually buys a free cast, so fluidity pays. The boss flips between stances to punish anyone who settles into one job.

Godot 4
Data driven jobs
Headless autopilot test

The lobby threat assessment screen reading OVERRUN at eight investigators

Coldspot

Co-op paranormal investigation for one to eight people. Read the instruments, work out what is haunting the place, get out.

The question. What if bringing more friends made it more dangerous instead of safer?

One pressure value drives eight difficulty knobs. At five players and up, one of the entity's three evidence channels stops reporting entirely, so the only way to close the gap is reading behaviour. The answer never leaves the host.

Godot 4
Seeded procedural houses
Room graph navigation

Gravehaul

Four incompetent grave robbers physically dragging coffins and ragdoll corpses out of a cemetery before sunrise.

The question. Is two players carrying one coffin funnier than one player carrying two?

Carrying is a real physics constraint shared between players, so the comedy comes from disagreeing about which way to go. Cursed loot lands on whoever grabs first, and nobody else knows which curse you picked up.

Godot 4
Jolt Physics
Host authoritative props

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

03 About

I have been building games solo in Godot for a few years. The work I care about is the layer under the fun part: making a rules engine that gives the same answer every time, making a server that does not trust the client, making an AI whose decisions you can read off the screen while it is deciding.

I test the things that tests can actually see, and I look at the ones they cannot. Most of the screenshots on this page came out of harnesses I wrote for exactly that reason, because a green test suite has never once told me a room was too dark to play in.

I am looking for gameplay or systems work, or a generalist seat at a small studio where shipping matters more than job titles.

Want to talk?

outlawstarz.dev@gmail.com Resume (PDF)

itch.io/outlawstarz github.com/outlawstarz