Paititi: the adventure game I dreamed of as a kid

As a kid in France, I loved The Mysterious Cities of Gold: Esteban, Zia and Tao crossing the ocean and the Andes in search of the lost Inca cities. And I loved the Indiana Jones films: the hat, the whip, the booby-trapped temples and the rolling boulder. Ever since, I've had a dream: to make an adventure game like that. Today I live in Pucón, at the foot of the Andes, I've made my first games (Rania, Brick Trotter, Chrono Trotter) and I've decided to go for it. It's called Paititi, and this is its first development diary.

Paititi title screen — The title screen: Tomás facing the Andes and the Amazon.

Paititi, the lost city

Paititi exists in legend: an Inca city hidden in the rainforest, east of the Andes, where the Incas are said to have kept their treasure safe from the conquistadors. Many expeditions have looked for it without finding it. It was the perfect name for a game that, like the Cities of Gold, ends in front of a treasure.

The story

1936. Tomás Varela, a Chilean archaeologist, receives a parcel in Valparaíso from his old mentor, Professor Hartmann, who vanished in the Amazon: his travel notebook and a golden piece of a condor-shaped medallion. Once complete, the medallion opens the gate of Paititi. But a brotherhood of treasure hunters, the Hermandad del Oro, led by the elegant and cruel Viktor Strand, is after it too.

Tomás studies the map and the Condor medallion — Valparaíso, 1936: the professor's notebook and the first piece of the medallion.

The seaplane flies into the storm over the Andes — Intro panel: the storm over the mountains.

The story is told in comic panels at the start of each chapter, generated with Gemini from my directions.

The chapters

1. Over the Andes: cross the mountains in a seaplane and fly through the storm; lightning sets the engine on fire and you must parachute over the Amazon.
2. The jungle: hack your way through with a machete, dodge arrows, escape anacondas and jaguars, cure poison with the red resin of sangre de grado and find the Temple of the Jaguar.
3. The river: build a raft from balsa logs and vines, then ride downriver: a village, a green-water swamp, the Pongo rapids and finally a hidden lagoon.
4. Paititi: climb the terraces, solve the puzzle of the Gate of the Sun (condor, jaguar, serpent) and find the Inca treasure.
Bonus: Patagonia: survive the cold by a lake, light a fire, keep the pumas away and escape a temple... chased by a rolling boulder. A nod, of course.

The burning plane and Tomás under his parachute — Lightning sets the engine on fire: a parachute jump over the Amazon.

Tomás under his parachute above the river bends — Chapter 1, in game: the parachute jump over the Amazon's river bends.

Jungle trail with the Temple of the Jaguar in the distance — Chapter 2: the jungle and, in the distance, the Temple of the Jaguar.

A guardian of Paititi on the trail — A guardian on the trail: dodge his arrows or hide behind a tree trunk.

An anaconda in the creek — Swimming in the creek is a bad idea: anacondas lurk there.

A jaguar stalks Tomás in the jungle — Chapter 2 panel: a jaguar in the leaves.

The raft on the river — Chapter 3: a raft of balsa logs, built with the machete.

The Pongo rapids between two cliffs — The Pongo rapids, between two cliffs.

Paititi's plaza and the Gate of the Sun — Chapter 4: Paititi's plaza and the three discs of the Gate of the Sun.

The Inca treasure in the temple — The ending: the Inca treasure, deep inside the temple.

Tomás by the fire in Patagonia — The bonus chapter: surviving in Chilean Patagonia, by the fire.

The guardians of Paititi

In the jungle, Tomás runs into the guardians of Paititi, who have defended the city for five centuries: jaguar masks, turquoise and ochre paint, bows and blowpipes. They are a people invented for the game, on purpose: I'd rather not stage a real Amazonian people, and this way I'm free to design their rites and traps. In the end you understand they are protecting the city from the Hermandad del Oro.

How I'm making it

Engine: Godot 4.7 in 3D, with the code in GDScript, like Brick Trotter and Chrono Trotter, and Claude Code as copilot.
Characters: made with MakeHuman inside Blender. Tomás's beard grows from one chapter to the next.
Jungle and animals: free 3D models (trees, palms, ferns, jaguar, caiman, toucans, macaws, capybaras) and plants painted by Gemini.
Sound: the sounds are synthesised in code, including the seaplane's piston engine, generated in Python.
Languages: six from the start (Spanish, English, French, Portuguese, German and Italian).
Performance: about 40 frames per second on my laptop with Intel graphics, at medium quality.

Tomás with one and several days of beard, and a guardian — The MakeHuman characters: Tomás's beard grows from chapter to chapter.

What's next?

It's a prototype: the four chapters can be played from start to finish, but there's a lot left to do. Coming next: proper character animations, more detail in the jungle, climbing the Andes and a test on an Android phone. I'll share the progress here, as with WindRush, my windsurfing game. If you want to know how I build my games, read making an Android game with Godot.

What was your childhood adventure show or film? Write to me. And if you have a game or app project, see my custom software service.

3D model credits (CC BY 3.0, Poly Pizza): «Small Airplane» seaplane by Vojtěch Balák; jaguar and caiman by Poly by Google. The other models are public domain (Quaternius, Isa Lousberg, CreativeTrio, MakeHuman).

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