Game - Smash Copter

This is a game built on TMC's Dot collection, rather than a piece of it. Its antagonist is the floor: platforms balanced on single pillars, forty metres up, and a cannon in the middle throwing things at whoever is standing on them.

The Dot collection is a set of open source Godot 4 assets that provide modular building blocks for games and applications in the TMC ecosystem, covering core functionality, networking, authentication, cloud integration, and more. This project is built out of them, so it doubles as a worked example of what they look like in a real game rather than in a demo.

This project and the assets under it are COMPLETELY OPEN SOURCE. You are free to use, modify, and distribute them under the terms of the MIT license. The only thing not open source is the back-end web infrastructure. So if you opt into using your own authentication backend instead of integrating with TMC, you will need to build and integrate your own back-end infrastructure.

From Maintainer & WARNING

This project, along with every asset it is built on, was built initially with Claude Code and will continue to be maintained and extended using it. This is because I (gamemann) cannot build the entire TMC platform alone (I wish I could lol).

Please treat this as partially tested. It has its own headless test suite and that suite passes, but very little of this has been in front of real players yet. Expect rough edges, and please report anything you run into.

I intend on reviewing code, testing, and editing documentation regularly. If you're interested in helping out, please let me know!

A Platform, a Pillar and a Cannon

Two to six teams stand on platforms balanced on single pillars, forty metres up, while a cannon in the middle throws things at them. Whoever is still up when the clock runs out is thrown into a corner of the sky with a weapon they did not choose, and the last team standing wins.

It is a first- and third-person multiplayer minigame built on the dot-* addon family: dot-props for everything the cannon throws, dot-vehicle for the chopper, dot-combat for health and hit registration, dot-match for the round and the sides, dot-player-controller for the movement, dot-net for the replication, dot-game for the server wiring and zee-dot-weapons for the twenty-seven weapons the second half is fought with.

Running it

godot --path .                                                # play it, alone, against stand-ins
godot --headless --path . res://examples/headless_run.tscn    # the simulation, 150 checks
godot --headless --path . res://examples/dedicated.tscn       # as a real server, 61 checks
godot --headless --path . res://examples/headless_net.tscn     # over the wire, 145 checks
tools/shot.sh --view=field                                    # render a frame and look at it
tools/shot.sh --view=jump --sc-layout-ids=checker             # the jump a layout means

The same client plays alone and plays online: with no server link in the registry it runs the world itself, and with one it predicts its own movement and draws everything else from what the server sends. There is no separate single-player build to keep in step.

A round is two games

The first two minutes are about footing. Nobody can hurt anybody. Every platform is a 10.5 metre square balanced on a pillar 1.35 metres across, so it leans toward whatever is standing on it — and a platform past sixteen degrees comes off its pillar and takes everybody on it down forty metres to the floor.

The last ninety seconds are a fight. The survivors are teleported to corner pads in the sky, handed weapons drawn at random from the pack, and given four seconds before anybody can shoot. The corners are joined to a ring in the middle by catwalks, so holding your pad is safe and winning is not.

Key
Shift	walk. Running is the default and running is what tips a platform
Space / Ctrl	jump and crouch — and, in the chopper, up and down
E	get into, or out of, whatever is next to you
F5	swap between first and third person
1–5	weapon slots, in the showdown
Y / U / V	say something, say it to your side, hold to talk

Shift is a brake

This is the one control the map is built around, and it is the opposite of every other game in this family. Running is the default speed. A platform is destabilised in proportion to how hard the people on it are moving, so a running player leans it about three times as far as a standing one — which means the only way to cross a platform somebody is already standing on the far side of is to slow down. The key everybody already holds to go faster is the one that saves you.

What the cannon throws

Eight props in four tiers, and the tier is the whole design. The tiers unlock over the round, so the opening is survivable and the last thirty seconds are not.

Tier		What it does to a platform
1	Crate, tyre, cone	Wobbles it. Survivable by standing still, which is what it teaches
2	Barrel, boulder	Tips it. A barrel also goes off, and is the only thing in the first half that throws a player upward
3	Container, slab	Takes a corner off it, and adds to the damage the next one lands on
4	Monolith	Deletes it, with everybody on it, whatever its health

The cannon aims. It picks a platform that is still standing, solves the arc that reaches it, and scatters the aim by a few metres — so every shot is a warning a player can read off the sky, and missing is still possible.

Special rounds

A third of rounds start with one, and one can also arrive part way through a round that looked ordinary. Each is a set of multipliers over numbers the game already has, so a special that halves the gravity slows the props, softens the platforms and lengthens the jumps without one line of code mentioning any of the three.

barrage · heavy · feather (low gravity) · slick (ice) · gale (wind) · quake · jelly (loose pins) · downpour · rush

Two can overlap and they multiply, which is a legitimate and very funny thing to be in the middle of.

Layouts

The field is re-rolled at the start of every round: eight arrangements of the same platforms, from the full grid down to two islands with nothing between them. Two of them park a chopper.

full · checker · islands · spine · airfield · gauntlet · broadside · hollow

A layout is a handful of numbers and a list of cells, so the whole map travels to a client in about thirty bytes and both ends build the identical field in the identical order. Each one also says which jumps it means — along the rows, or only the diagonals on the chequerboard, or none at all on the gauntlet — and the suite holds every gap on every layout to what a running player can actually clear. SC_LAYOUT_IDS=checker (or --sc-layout-ids=checker) runs one layout all evening.

The chopper

Two seats. The pilot flies it with the keys they already walk with — jump climbs, crouch descends, A and D are the pedals, W and S are the cyclic — and the left trigger drops a crate on whatever is underneath. The passenger can shoot.

It is not either of the two chassis dot-vehicle ships: a wheeled one needs wheels on the ground and a hovercraft refuses to thrust when there is nothing under it, which is exactly the state a helicopter spends its life in. ScCopter is a fourth kind, loaded through the addon's own extension point, and nothing in dot-vehicle knows what a helicopter is.

Configuring a server

Every number is a cvar or an environment variable, layered defaults < JSON < environment < command line like everything else in this family. Two dozen of them are live and write through to the running world, because finding a server's numbers means moving one between rounds with people watching.

sc_survival_seconds 150     // longer first half
sc_teams 4                  // four sides, four corners
sc_stiffness 4.0            // wobblier platforms
sc_motion_gain 3.0          // running matters more
sc_cannon_interval 1.2      // a busier sky
sc_cannon_max_tier 2        // nothing that deletes a platform outright
sc_special_chance 60        // most rounds are strange
sc_bot_spread 2             // sharper stand-ins
sc_chopper 0                // no chopper on any layout
sc_min_players 6            // keep six in the round with stand-ins

A moderator has dot-moderation's live tools, with this game's meaning for each: noclip, freeze, speed, gravity, god, buddha, hp, slay, slap, rename, the teleports, and blind <player> [on|off|seconds] and beacon <player> [on|off]. A blind blacks out that player's own screen and nobody else's, tilt bar included; a beacon puts a pulsing ring, a column you can see from anywhere and a ping on one player for everybody. Both outlive a round, as god does. respawn, give and strip are refused, and modtools says why.

sc_status, sc_net, sc_layouts and sc_specials say what the server is doing. An empty server fills itself with stand-ins, because a round needs two sides to exist at all and one person alone would otherwise watch a round start and end several times a second.

Playing it against a server

It is a dedicated-server game, delivered the way every other game in this family is: published as a signed content pack and downloaded by the client shell on connect, so a new version needs no new client build.

# in dot-server-deploy
godot --headless --path ../mg-smash-copter --import
./server pack smash --source games/mg-smash-copter
./server --game smash
# then connect the client shell to 127.0.0.1:6070

That path is checked rather than described: dot-server-deploy/examples/smash_client.tscn publishes nothing and assumes nothing, but it mounts the pack on a real server, connects a real client over a real socket, and asserts that the module's script is the mounted copy, that the world builds its platforms under its own gravity, that a round starts and the cannon puts something in the air, and that the client rebuilds a field of its own. It is the only place any of that can be seen: the three suites above all run inside this project, where the files are at res:// and the globals are registered, which is the one condition a delivered pack never has.

What replicates, and what does not

A player's own movement	Predicted, and corrected. The only thing in the game that is
Everybody else's movement	Replicated and interpolated
The platforms	Four numbers each — two angles, a height and a state — decided entirely by the server. A platform is the FLOOR, and a floor that two machines disagreed about is a player falling through something their own machine says is holding them up
Props and choppers	Server-authoritative, never predicted. Two rigid-body solvers diverge within a second
The pilot	Not predicted either: while somebody is flying, their controller has no answer to predict
How many platforms are left	An event twice a second. A client runs no platform model, so it cannot count them — and that number is the most important one on the HUD

The art

Every surface is Kenney's Prototype Textures, six files, one per role — the deck, the pillar, the cannon, the corners, the hazard and the pads. Everything the cannon throws is from the Survival and Car kits. The weapons are the pack's own. All of it is CC0, which asks for nothing and permits everything; each kit's licence ships beside the files it covers.

The chopper is geometry, because there is no helicopter in any of the kits and a machine that looked like a van would have been worse.

The map itself is built in code. A grid of squares on pillars, a cylinder in the middle and a ring of pads in the sky is not something worth authoring in a scene file, and a map that is a description rather than a build is a map a client can be told about in one message.

What does not work yet

• Nobody draws somebody else's gun. The weapon state replicates — the slot, the reload, the switch and a use counter — but hanging a world model on a watcher's copy of a player needs a character with a hand mount, and this game draws players as capsules.
• Stand-ins fall off more than they shoot. Two thirds of the deaths in a showdown played by stand-ins are falls. They are four lines of brain with an aim error, which is enough to make an empty server look alive and is not a bot worth fighting. sc_bot_advance and sc_bot_spread are the two knobs.
• No profiles and no avatars. dot-game reports the missing identity layer and carries on, which is a server where everybody is a guest.

Licence

MIT. See LICENSE.

The art is the exception, and it is a more permissive one: the prototype textures and every kit the cannon throws are Kenney's, released under CC0 1.0, which is public domain with no attribution required. Each kit's own licence text ships unchanged beside the files it covers.