Learning Vim’s movement keys is mostly a matter of repetition until the muscle memory takes over. The problem is that drilling hjkl in a text editor is boring enough that most people give up before it clicks. superVIMus is an attempt to make that repetition worth doing.
It’s a box-pushing puzzle game — think Sokoban — where the only movement is h, j, k, and l. The mechanics are simple enough that your brain isn’t distracted by the game itself and can focus on internalising which key goes which direction. By the time you finish a few levels, the mapping starts to feel natural.
Building it in Godot
The game is built in Godot using GDScript. The grid-based movement was the interesting technical problem: every action is discrete, so the engine’s physics system isn’t involved at all — everything is coordinate math on a tile grid, checking whether the target cell is empty or contains a pushable box, and whether the box has room to slide.
Godot’s scene tree made it straightforward to keep the level state clean and implement undo — each move is recorded as a delta, so you can step back without re-simulating anything. The pixel art style fit the project naturally and kept the asset work scoped to something one person could actually finish.
The absurdist framing — the slightly unhinged pixel characters, the deliberately odd scenario — was a deliberate choice to make something that didn’t feel like homework. Whether it worked is up to you to decide. Play it below.