Notes from building 7aba FPS on Godot's OpenFPS framework

7aba FPS is our first-person shooter built on top of the OpenFPS Godot framework. Game dev isn't our main line of work, but building it taught us things that show up in "serious" software too.

Starting from a framework changes what you architect

OpenFPS gave us the character controller, weapon system, and hitscan logic out of the box. That freed up the actual project time for enemy AI and level-specific mechanics — the part that makes the game ours rather than a tech demo of someone else's framework.

Enemy AI is a state machine wearing a costume

Strip away the animations and sound design, and enemy behavior is a handful of states — patrol, alert, engage, retreat — with clear transition conditions between them. Getting the transitions to feel natural took more iteration than any individual state's logic.

Hitscan is deceptively simple until it isn't

Raycasting a shot and applying damage is a few lines. Making it feel fair — accounting for network or frame timing, hit registration near cover edges, and consistent behavior across different weapon ranges — is where most of the actual engineering time went.

Why we still do this

Game dev keeps a different set of muscles active: tight feedback loops, a low tolerance for anything that feels "almost right," and constant playtesting. Those habits carry over directly into how we build and test agents.