Week Zero: Welcome to Godot

I want to make a game that combines:

• The deck builder battles of STS
• The exploration and events of FTL
• The party & inventory management of turn-based RPGs / dnd

I've given myself approximately 12 weeks

So far

• "Week 0", it's right before the holidays and I'm still learning Godot
• Working on getting the battle system online

Technical Side

Really impressed with the await signal pattern in Godot4. An awaitable Signal class would be a cool thing to have in javascript

Ran into a lot of trouble with text rendering in 3d: Godot builtin 3d text is just a texture on a rect… Which gives bad antialiasing results when not viewed straight on.

Workaround is to use Mesh-based text, but that required rewriting all the layout controls to work in 3d.

Went ahead and did that; produced roughly:

• Div - base class; exposes a LayoutResult with bounding box & baseline.
• FlexDiv - arranges content in a line horizontally or vertically. Options for alignment on secondary axis.
• FlowDiv - arranges content into lines that auto wrap. This doesn't handle space characters at all: instead I split text into a series of words and put each word in a Span
• Span - A single unbreakable piece of text; exposes a LayoutResult.
• Sprite3D - Div-based containers also support positioning the builtin Sprite3D, so you can put icons inline with text.

Produced a CardView that can display cards

• Internally cards are represented as plain class instances; I saw some suggestions online of using Scenes or Resources to represent card-like objects, but couldn't find a way that pattern made sense to me.

Built the battle flow; so you can play cards, target enemies, kill things

Internally there's a lot of state complexity here; there's the battle_state which is a instant representation of the battle. This is used so you can pre-play cards before the previous card is done playing (visually). Then there's also the animation_queue which allows animations to happen sequentially.

• For example, if you play the card Scratch: Attack 2, the actual play method is roughly:
• battle_state.get_target(target).hp -= 2
• animation_quque.push(attack animation)
• animation_quque.push(update target hp)

Game Design Side

Stats

I'm pulling the idea of character stats from DnD - so each character has 4 primary stats.

• Strength - How hard things get hit
• Precision - How well things get hit
• Soul - Magical aptitude
• Voice - Ability to influence others

Stats are referenced on cards: so a card may read Attack [str], which does damage based on how strong the character is. An accuracy-themed card may use Attack [pre] instead, which makes it good with different builds than the strength equivalent.
Targeting

I like games that let you target enemies or allies, so cards have more targeting options than the minimum self/one enemy/all enemies. Right now I'm displaying that as part of the cost icon, but idk how well that works.

The icon for "costs 1; target one enemy"

Characters

A core mechanic is that you're controlling a party of 1-3 characters.

At this stage I have two characters in the game:

• Fighter: Does mainly single target damage
• Wind Dancer: Debuffing & AoE

Right now Fighter feels a lot like StS's Ironclad or a Dnd Fighter; trying to find ways to make this class more unique while still keeping it simple for new players.

Wind Dancer is supposed to be a more complex character. Right now her primary mechanic is Combo, which triggers an extra effect when the previously-played card was also a Wind Dancer card.

Overall

The battle system works! Lots of placeholder art still, but you can fight an enemy to death.