Chimeracers
A disgraced scientist makes a living the only way left to him: mutating the animals in his pen into chimeras and racing them for cash. Experiment between races to stack stat-bending mutations, then line up against the field.
The Jam
Godot Wild Jam is a themed, community-rated jam run roughly monthly, made entirely in the Godot Engine. Entry #94, built with Team CABFY.
Play It
What We Made
Splice animals into chimeras and race them for cash.
A scientist — kicked out of university for unethical experiments, then fired from the pet store — needs a new way to make a living. The answer: mutate the animals in his pen into chimeras and enter them in races. That’s the theme, “Mutation,” as the whole premise rather than a single power-up.
Between races you Experiment on your racer, stacking mutations that trade one stat against another — +200% top speed but +200% sprint cost, +50% acceleration for +100% energy recovery. Then you line up against the rest of the field and watch it play out on the track.
What I Built
I owned the animals end to end — how they look, how they move, and the mutation system that warps them.
Animal design
Designing the roster of chimeras — the base animals and the mismatched pairings that make each one read at a glance: the rabbit, the aardvark, the boar, the elephant, the turtles. Silhouette and colour first, so they stay distinct in a five-wide field on a small screen.
Mutation system
The “Experiment” loop that defines the game: mutations are percentage modifiers (top speed, acceleration, sprint cost, sprint power, energy recovery) that stack onto a racer’s base stats, usually buffing one thing while taxing another. Set up as data so a mutation can be added or retuned without touching the race code.
Animal animation
Sprite animation for every creature — run cycles, idle, and the start and finish beats — kept cheap enough to have the whole field animating at once during a race.
Screenshots
Post-mortem
What went well
- Team communication — the team stayed coordinated over Discord for the full nine days.
- Artwork production — art got made quickly and held a consistent style across the whole roster.
- Music — the soundtrack came together well and fit the game’s tone.
What I’d do differently
- Asset workflow for the animal combinations — every chimera pairing needed hand-editing to look right, so the number of combinations we could ship was capped by manual work. A modular rig or a way to blend parts procedurally would have let the mutation idea go much further.
Tools used
- Godot 4
- Aseprite
- Krita
- LMMS
- Git + GitHub
- Discord