Making The Spy Below: GoldenEye 64 meets Police Squad

The Spy Below started with a dumb premise I couldn't shake: a spy thriller where the spy is an idiot and wins anyway. Picture GoldenEye on the N64, then hand the controller to the lead from Police Squad.

The two things it's made of

If you owned a Nintendo 64, you know exactly what GoldenEye 007 felt like. The chunky low-poly guards, the dim corridors, the way a single objective could keep four friends arguing on one couch for an entire evening. That look and that feeling are the whole visual target here. Blocky silhouettes, readable at a glance, lit by one moody source at a time.

The other half is comedy, and specifically the very particular comedy of Police Squad and the Naked Gun films. A man strides through chaos with total confidence, gets every single detail wrong, and somehow comes out the other side completely fine. Every cop parody in that lineage runs on the same engine: the lead is sure he's the smartest guy in the room, and the joke is that he's wrong in a way he'll never notice. I wanted a spy game built on that exact misunderstanding.

Meet John Bond

Our hero is John Bond. Yes, that family. John's the least successful brother of the lot, the one nobody mentions at reunions, the one whose codename got assigned more out of paperwork than respect. What he lacks in skill he makes up for in raw, unearned confidence. He has ambition. He has swagger. He has, by any reasonable measure, no business being in the field.

His defining trait is that he never reads the brief. He'll rappel into a building with no idea what he's there to grab, who he's meant to stop, or why anyone is shooting at him. He just assumes it'll work out, and the running gag of the whole game is that it does, usually for reasons that have nothing to do with anything John actually did.

The plot, more or less

On paper the story is the most familiar spy plot there is. There are nuclear launch codes, they're about to fall into the wrong hands, and someone has to stop that from happening. Standard stuff.

The twist is John. He does everything wrong, or backwards, or in the worst possible order, and survives anyway. He trips the alarm he was supposed to disable. He interrogates the wrong man. He takes the lift up when the codes are three floors down. The mission technically succeeds around him, like the world is quietly cleaning up after a toddler who thinks he just defused a bomb.

How it actually gets built

I'm one person, so the pipeline matters as much as the design. The game runs on Godot 4.6, compiled to WebAssembly so it plays in a browser tab, and a lot of the code was written with Claude Opus 4.8. That's just how most games get made now, and pretending otherwise only slows you down.

Levels are a back-and-forth. I block a space out in the Godot editor, get a feel for the scale, then hand the structure to Claude to fill in the geometry and the props, then go back in by hand and tune the parts that feel wrong. The sewer and the basement below the target building both came together that way: rough shape from me, detail from the model, final polish from me again.

Here's the lesson that cost me the most time. My first instinct was to keep prompts short. I'd type something like "make a basement in a square shape" and wait for magic. That's nowhere near enough information, and Opus answered exactly as literally as I asked. A square room. Four walls. Done. Technically correct and completely useless.

So the prompts got long. Really long. I learned to spell out the ceiling height, the lighting, where cover should sit, how a guard should path through the space, what the player sees first when they walk in. The more detail I gave, the better the result, and a single room could take a dozen rounds of "no, the pillars should be load-bearing and break up the sightlines, move the boiler to the back corner, the door swings inward." The model's a fast pair of hands. The taste and the specifics still have to come from me.

The look is simple on purpose

A quick note before anyone files a bug report about the graphics. The blocky characters and flat skin and untextured walls are the point, not a budget I ran out of. This is the aesthetic I'm chasing.

There's a practical payoff too. Keeping the art this lean means the whole thing runs on basically anything, including the kind of low-end laptop a kid actually has access to. Better graphics aren't on my roadmap. If you came for ray tracing, you came to the wrong sewer.

The sound of a budget Bond

The audio is where I let myself have the most fun. That big brassy spy sting, the one that plays over the title sequence, came out of Suno. Play the alpha through to the end and you'll hear the full thing roll over the credits, a gun-barrel homage drawn entirely in code. I did the music editing in FL Studio, cleaned up the sound effects in Audacity, and built the voice-over from a mix of ElevenLabs and ChatterBox. None of it's subtle. All of it's on theme.

Where it goes from here

What's live now is an alpha, the opening stretch of a much bigger thing. I've got a document with fifteen chapters mapped out, and they're genuinely exhilarating and very stupid in the best way. That number will probably grow. The ideas keep arriving faster than I can build them.

The feature I'm most excited about is online multiplayer. I want that GoldenEye couch energy, the split-screen chaos of four friends picking weird character models and game modes and trying to ruin each other's evening, except now nobody has to be in the same room for it. Same as we did with Yours Truly, The Warlord and Survive the Night, you'll be able to invite your friends straight into a session. If you're looking for a group, our Discord is the place to find one.

If any of this sounds like your kind of nonsense, go play The Spy Below in your browser and then come hang out on our Discord. Tell me how badly John embarrassed himself on your run. He won't have noticed.