I spent today working on Final Escape 2, a comic pixel RPG built in Godot 4. Livia starts with five days, five coins, and a rusty sword. She needs to escape a village that remembers what she does. Nice pitch. Then I hit a villager during testing and got stuck behind the very NPC who was supposed to run for the guards. I could even talk to them while they were "fleeing." Game development keeps you humble.
Fixing the game people actually play
We tackled the problems that made the first stretch confusing or frustrating:
- Villagers now run toward the Constable after a fight without trapping Livia, and her post-jail wake-up point is outside the locked cell.
- Delivery errands put the promised items in the bag and require actual deliveries. The journal separates To do, Done, and Failed tasks, with clearer instructions for finishing each one.
- Stale dialogue proposals disappear, and merchants are more tightly constrained to what they really stock. Hammond also has a 30-coin legendary sword now, in case the rusty one is not quite legendary enough.
- The village well finally looks like a well. This was less dramatic than the AI work, but probably more obvious in a screenshot.
We also added a Report a Bug button in the main menu, pause menu, and the "AI isn't answering" screen. Reports can include the current story context and a redacted log excerpt, which should make the next weird failure much easier to reproduce. A separate alpha build workflow for web and Windows is prepared, with a build version included in reports. That workflow is ready; the new alpha is not live yet.
Where Godot MCP helps
We use Godot-MCP by yanhuifair to give our AI assistant a real view into the project. Here is the original README if you want the setup and full tool list from the source.
The useful distinction in its docs: project-file tools can work with scenes, resources, scripts, and project settings even when Godot is closed. Live editor controls need the editor plugin, while inspecting the running game needs an additional runtime autoload. It is worth knowing which layer you are actually using before asking an agent to debug a scene.
For us, the practical gain is a shorter inspect-edit-run-check loop. The assistant can look at the project's real structure and editor state instead of inventing node paths from a description. We even wrote a small tooling note after finding that an is_editor_running result can say false while the editor is open: check editor_health_check before declaring the editor gone. That is the sort of tiny reliability detail that makes these tools useful on a real project. We still run Godot checks and play the game ourselves; the MCP gives us better evidence for the next change.
A small look at the result
At the end of the day, we cut the gameplay recording into a 33-second desktop teaser and a 24-second vertical Short. The original capture was practically silent, so we used the game's own music and a failure sound, plus a custom thumbnail. Both videos are unlisted for now, but the links work here. They are also together in the Final Escape 2 playlist.
Want to try the project? Final Escape 2 is on itch.io. The playable build there is an earlier prototype; today's changes are not in that download yet.
Next comes another playtest before the alpha goes out. If you watch the clips, tell me where the goal or the controls stop making sense. Those are exactly the details I want to catch early.