Copilot motivated me to continue my abandoned game project!

Poochita Poochita — Sat, 30 May 2026 17:44:30 +0000

What I Built

I built Vital Flame, a 2D Godot action RPG prototype with exploration, combat, quests, farming, items, bosses, merchants, crafting, and LAN multiplayer.

The project started as a rough RPG idea where I wanted the player to explore different areas, fight enemies and bosses, gather items, grow crops, complete quests, and slowly progress through the world. It already had a strong foundation, but many systems were unfinished, hardcoded, or disconnected.

Demo

Before
https://youtu.be/if3JXl8WAN4
After
https://youtu.be/PVNdv-XviZE

Screenshots:

The Comeback Story

Before, Vital Flame was a promising but unfinished Godot RPG prototype. It had movement, combat, enemies, items, and exploration, but many features still needed polish. Farming only had a simple planting loop, weapons did not yet feel unique enough, LAN multiplayer did not fully sync important visuals, and NPC systems like quests, crafting, and merchants were still limited.

For this challenge, I focused on finishing and polishing key systems.

I improved the quest system with a cleaner quest log, quest progress tracking, better save integration, and a more stable quest accept flow. I polished farming by adding crop growth visuals, planting feedback, harvest animation, and scaling that works with my 64x64 crop setup. I also improved combat feedback by adding floating damage numbers, making battles easier to read.

After these changes, the game feels closer to a playable RPG instead of just a prototype. The loop is clearer: explore, fight, gather, farm, complete quests, improve your character, and continue progressing through the world.

The game still uses some free placeholder assets, but the systems are now much more complete and easier to expand.

My Experience with GitHub Copilot

GitHub Copilot helped me move faster by generating first drafts of several systems I wanted to add.

For the quest system, Copilot helped create the first version of a quest notification and improved quest log system. I then debugged it by fixing broken Godot API calls, repairing save integration, cleaning corrupted UI symbols, and stabilizing the quest accept flow.

For farming, Copilot helped generate a first pass for crop growth visuals, planting animation, harvest animation, and growth progress feedback. I then fixed a stack overflow issue, warning-as-error problems, and adjusted the visuals so they worked with my actual crop scale.

For combat, Copilot helped generate the first version of a floating damage number system. The first version had resource and typing errors, so I fixed the scene preload, repaired the .tscn reference, added explicit typing, and made the system actually run in-game.

Copilot was useful as a fast brainstorming and scaffolding partner, but I still had to understand the code, debug it, and adapt it to my project. That became the main comeback story: using Copilot to get momentum, then finishing the work by making the generated systems stable and game-ready.

Big Creditss to free assets I found on Itch.io

DEV Community: Poochita Poochita

Copilot motivated me to continue my abandoned game project!

What I Built

Demo

The Comeback Story

My Experience with GitHub Copilot