I’ve been busy. The game is building and deploying to Steam, I know whether it’s been purchased using GodotSteam, I moved to a command queue for animations, I’ve implemented FMOD reactive audio, added YarnSpinner for dialog, and started an overworld map. There’s also a main menu, settings menu, about ten minutes of original music, and some new gameplay mechanics.

Main Menu

Tada.

Yeah, so I broke my own rule, and it’s been more than a week since I last posted. I felt like I was making progress, but it wasn’t “enough” to discuss yet. Here it is, almost Wednesday of the next week, and if I don’t push myself to write this now, it’s going to probably wait until next week.

I’m going back and forth about whether I’m going to post a screenshot or video; I’ve posted a couple things on the Discord, but in general, things are Not Quite Ready.

This isn’t necessarily perfection paralysis, but I also am very familiar with a Minimally Viable Product and making sure what I do present is coherent enough that I can get actionable feedback.

I know there’s no save games (although I did set up Steam Cloud) because I don’t have the system for progression yet, which is what the overworld renders. I have generated a map, but I didn’t like it so I scrapped it. When I do build the map, it should be better than whatever you thought I made that I scrapped.

There are scenarios and sequence offsets, so I can say there’s X Y Z opponents in this environment and here’s what order they act in. They’re all resources now and easily managed.

There are not encounters yet; the MVP will be a YarnSpinner dialog, a question, and a random (but fair) result based on the answer. This will be the foundation for additional encounters.

There isn’t a full economy yet; you can get scrap, but you don’t use it for anything yet.

The player classes aren’t balanced yet. There’s a debugging class called “oops_all_evades” which is great for testing mechanics, but you will eventually lose through attrition.

There’s two opponents. They are functionally different, but that’s not nearly enough variety. I haven’t given any of them any type of multiplier effect yet. All opponents are literally represented by red squares. The player is a blue square when playing, but is a black square in a draft title sequence.

I spent a couple days implementing a command queue, which also meant moving a few more things into Godot State Charts, then optimizing until I had a scalable pattern. Just about everything is wired up to it, but every once and a while something will happen that I forgot to consider, like if you have a timed effect that is evaded, there’s no sound/animation.

There’s no memory system yet (although there is a nascent system for keeping track of how many times you’ve encountered someone). There are no blueprints for building devices, which will persist beyond death.

But… the game builds to both Windows and Linux, automatically deploys to Steam, and is playable on the Steam Deck. So, that’s nice.

Do I have Steam Keys? Yes. Can you have one? Not yet, because I want to make sure that there’s enough to test and validate. It won’t be content complete, but it needs to be coherent. Soon.

Come join the nullband.games Discord; when I’m ready for playtesting, that’s where I’m going to be conducting it. I implemented a public codecks.io board, and you can submit feature requests and bug reports to it through Discord. I’m sincerely honored by the support of everyone who is there now.