I’m incredibly excited about what I did in the past week; I now have a working frontend for the core card battler mechanic! Previously, I had modeled an entire conflict from start to finish, including several mechanics and end states, but it was running in isolation and practically executable only as unit tests. A picture is worth a thousand words, and boy were those logs verbose. There were several challenges in connecting the frontend.

I’ve been implementing and refining the core gameplay loop. Since last week, many more mechanics have been implemented and wired up. Opponents have AI, mechanisms have costs, you can win or lose, effects are applied resolve on different cadences, and a lot more. There were several refactoring passes to consolidate logic, switch to more scalable models, and to unify nomenclatures. Unit testing and seeding for deterministic experiences have been incredibly important for my development; it allows me to exercise specific mechanics over and over as I iterate.

I’ve been working on one overarching task for over a week, in Codecks the card is labeled as “Gameplay.” I’ve got a GDD, sketches, wireframes, and a couple of proof-of-concepts, but the real question I want to answer is whether or not it’s fun. In order to do that, I need to build something minimal to actually play the thing. Right now, “Gameplay” is like the Malcolm in the Middle bit where Hal tries to change a lightbulb, but is met with a series of blockers:

I’ve uploaded my first release to Itch; Skirmish, a prototype card game! I started working on it while I was first waiting to be accepted into a business startup program, and I continued as I developed my business plan. I wanted to implement a card game using standard playing cards and to practice using Godot. I started with War and got it modeled, but the lack of choice frustrated me - it wasn’t fun at all.

The first draft of the Game Design Document (GDD) for my game is about 80% done, and with it, I’m now able discuss it coherently and start getting feedback. On Tuesday, I attended my first ROC Game Dev open project night and chatted with a number of other developers, played what folks were working on, and discussed my project. I heard a cautionary tale of patent squatting on procedurally generated enemy systems; what I was planning didn’t intersect, but it was a good warning.