Fight or Flight

Team: Jack Drabenstadt, Sagid Saleh, Gleb Ksianevich, Matthew Kindja
Role: Designer, Dialogue System, Asset Creation, Git Management, Programming
Event: Pitt Games 4 Social Impact Game Jam 2025

Fight or Flight is a 2.5D platformer built in Godot over 48 hours. You play as Peng, a penguin fleeing its melting iceberg home. Unlike the other birds you encounter, you cannot fly — only waddle, slide, and jump. The game explores themes of climate displacement and environmental injustice through mechanical constraint: the birds who can fly migrate easily; you must survive.

My Contributions

Dialogue System: I built a text display system for NPC conversations. Each bird has unique text speed and sound pitch. This allowed us to impart more personality into a character without voice acting.

Art & Assets: In an unusual shift from my typical programming-heavy role, I created environment assets including icebergs and boulders. The 2.5D perspective required careful attention to scale and placement.

Git Management: I served as the team's resident Git expert, handling all merge conflicts and repository organization. This kept us moving fast without stepping on each other's work.

Process & Iteration

After last year's "First Penguin Award" (aim high, fail spectacularly), I came in with a plan. We started with tight player experience goals, which kept scope reasonable and focused. The core mechanics — movement, dialogue, levels — were solid by the end of day one. Day two was integration and polish.

I was initially worried our gameplay wasn't "novel" enough. I learned that's the wrong metric. A familiar genre executed with clarity and purpose is worth more than a half-baked innovative idea.

Outcome

Fight or Flight won the Technical Achievement Award. The game came together with relatively few major issues — we fixed the ones that appeared — and the structured approach I brought to the team made the difference.

Technologies

• Godot Engine
• GDScript
• Blender
• Git / GitHub
• Gimp

Play It