Save Jeanie: A 24-Hour Survival Game in Godot

Published 2026-08-31 by Faraz Rahimi

A 24-hour hackathon survival hide-and-seek game: radioactive aliens, Jolt physics, and a Gemini-powered intro chat before the hunt starts.

Tags: Godot, Game Dev, GDScript, Hackathon, Gemini

Save Jeanie is a high-stakes 3D hide-and-seek game I built in a 24-hour hackathon. You are dropped into a dark industrial space to find and eliminate radioactive aliens before their glow cooks you. Get close and your health drains. Stay too far and you never find them.

The story is simple on purpose. Jeanie has been abducted and forced into the game. You have one job: clear the map before the radiation wins.

What the tool is for

It is a playable vertical slice, not an engine demo. The round has to feel tense in the first thirty seconds: limited vision, audio tells, and a proximity penalty that makes sprinting in a straight line a bad idea.

I also wanted a character beat before the shooting starts. The intro is a short conversation with Jeanie so you care who you are saving, then the lights go out.

First-person hunt through a dark hangar, flashlight on a hiding alien.

The hunt is a lighting problem as much as an AI problem. You locate threats by glow, sound, and the way your health ticks down when you guess wrong.

How it technically works

The game runs on Godot 4.6 with the Forward+ renderer and Jolt Physics for movement and collisions. Enemies are placed in cover. Their radioactive skin is a visual and a mechanic: a proximity volume that applies damage as you close distance, so peeking a crate is a real trade.

Player locomotion is a standard character body with sprint, crouch, and a tight flashlight cone. I kept the cone narrow so the map stays readable instead of flooding the hangar with light.

Before the round, an intro chat talks to Google's Gemini API over Godot HTTPRequest. The prompt is locked to Jeanie's situation so the model cannot wander into generic NPC small talk. If the request fails, a local fallback script still gets you into the hunt. A jam game cannot hard-depend on a live model.

Jeanie speaking through a holographic chat before the round begins.

The shipped build is a browser export hosted on Netlify. That forced me to keep draw calls, physics bodies, and texture sizes honest. A 24-hour clock is a better product manager than a feature list.

If you want the round, it is live at deluxe-kashata-88169d.netlify.app.

Original post: https://farazrahimi.com/posts/save-jeanie-godot-survival-hide-and-seek