A open source contribution to Xogot, an iPad adaptation of the Godot engine, covering tutorial writing, GDScript development, and original character design. The work touched every layer of the project, from mobile input handling to hand-drawn enemy animations.
After following Xogot's development for over a year, I reached out to the team and was tasked with updating their tutorial content for mobile and new developers. What started as a documentation project expanded into a full overhaul: rewritten GDScript, new screenshots, touch controller fixes, and an entirely new cast of characters. I designed the player character around the project's axolotl mascot and replaced the original enemies with the axolotl's real predators, herons, carp, and snakes, each hand-sketched, vectorized in Illustrator, and animated for the game. The pond background was also redesigned to match the new direction.
Process
How it got made.
Selected stills for the project, either a in-progress image or a reference.
Xogot is an adaptation of the open source Godot engine built for iPad, developed by a small independent team. I had been following the project for over a year before reaching out to ask how I could contribute. The team tasked me with updating their existing tutorial content to reflect mobile development and make it more accessible to new developers.
The tutorial site is written in DocC and the game itself in GDScript. Over roughly a month of weekend work, I completed a full update to the tutorial, which involved new screenshots, significant codebase revisions driven by a character design change, and fixes for mobile-specific challenges including touch controller implementation.
Beyond the writing, I took on the visual side of the update as well. Xogot's mascot is an axolotl, so I designed a new player character to match the theme and replaced the original enemies with the axolotl's real-world predators: herons, carp, and snakes. To keep the enemies readable at a glance, all three share a consistent red eye design. I also produced a four-direction movement animation for the player and two-frame animations for each enemy type. Characters were sketched by hand and refined into vector graphics in Illustrator. The background was redesigned as a pond environment to fit the theme, replacing the grey placeholder used in the original.
