A shooter game maker where feel is the thing you tune
By Eduardo Orellana · Updated
Flockbay is free on your own Claude or ChatGPT plan. Claude Pro or Max, or ChatGPT Plus or higher, builds a real Godot project in the Godot editor. Claude Free and ChatGPT Free do not run here. More models are optional, a credit reload at API prices. Windows today. The engine is the official Godot release. Shooters are judged in the first ten seconds, and what is being judged is feel: how the camera moves, how long the recoil lasts, whether the hit registered. All of that is numbers you change by playing.
Nobody can hand you the feel
Every shooter template in every engine gives you a gun that fires. Almost none of them give you a gun that feels good, because feel is a stack of small decisions — mouse acceleration, weapon sway, the delay between click and shot, how long the enemy staggers, whether the reload can be cancelled — and the correct value for each depends on the game around it.
This is why "generate me an FPS" is not a satisfying answer to anything. You get something that technically shoots and then you have to fix all of it anyway.
What actually helps is making each of those numbers cheap to change and fast to test. That is the shape of the loop here: you say what is wrong, it changes, you play it again.
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The level is yours to build
Shooter levels are architecture. Sightlines, cover spacing, the height difference that makes one approach better than another, the corner that stops being safe once the enemy learns to flank. None of that is describable in a sentence, and it should not have to be.
In the builder you place geometry, terrain, water and buildings directly and walk through what you made. That is the hand-built half of the app, and for this genre it is the half that decides whether the game is any good.
It runs on your machine. Flockbay is a desktop app for Windows with Godot bundled inside, so pressing play gives you your own framerate. That matters for a shooter more than for most genres, because input latency is part of the feel you are trying to judge.
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The code is Flockbay's half
Weapons, ammunition, damage falloff, hit detection, enemy states, spawn logic, cover selection, scoring. Every one of those is code, and none of them are decisions you make by writing them — you make them by playing.
So you describe them. The shotgun should be lethal inside five metres and useless past ten. Enemies should stop pushing when two of them go down. The last round in a magazine should do the same damage as the first, because the alternative is annoying. Flockbay writes the GDScript in your project and you go and shoot things.
You never open a script unless you want to. Not writing the code does not mean not having an opinion about whether the rifle is too forgiving.
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Enemies are the hard part, not the weapons
A weapon is a set of numbers. An enemy is a small program that has to be readable from twenty metres away while it is trying to kill you. Players do not experience enemy AI as intelligence; they experience it as legibility. Can I tell what it is about to do?
Practically that means the useful notes are behavioural rather than technical. It should telegraph the charge. It should not shoot the instant it sees me. It should give up if I break line of sight for four seconds. Those go straight into the loop.
Getting this right takes several passes. Budget for that, and start with three enemies that behave differently rather than twelve that behave the same.
You will stop being able to judge it
After a few hours you are the best player of your own shooter, by a wide margin, and every fight will feel too easy. This happens to everyone and it is the main reason first-time difficulty tuning is wrong.
The cure is other people. Watch one person play, without helping them, and write down every place they stopped or died. That list is worth more than a week of your own opinions, because they are meeting the game the way a player will.
It also tends to reveal that the problem is legibility rather than difficulty. Players rarely say a fight was too hard; they say they did not see where the shot came from. Those are different fixes and only the second one is worth making.
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The practical details
Download and install on Windows. The project is a normal Godot project on your disk, because Godot is what is underneath and it is open source. Nothing is stored in a format that only one company can open.
Building needs an internet connection — the chat, asset generation and world data come over the network. Playing what you built does not.
Flockbay is free on your own AI: your Claude or ChatGPT plan, your own agent, or an API key.
A starting project for this is the shooter game templates. The design note that goes with it is what makes a good combat system.
Questions
- First person or third person?
- Either. The camera and controller are code, so you say which you want and adjust it by playing rather than by configuring.
- Can I make a multiplayer shooter?
- Networking is code like anything else, but it is the hardest thing to get right in any engine and it multiplies the tuning work. A first shooter finishes far more often as single player.
- Do I need to write GDScript?
- No. Flockbay writes it into your project. You can read it, because it is a normal Godot project, but the workflow does not ask you to.
- Does it run in a browser?
- No. It is a desktop app for Windows and your game runs locally on the bundled Godot, which is also what keeps input latency honest.
- Where do the weapon and character models come from?
- Generation, the web, or you. Simple geometry can also be built directly when that is the fastest way to get the feel right before art exists.