I had left off with a number of individual pieces that needed to be glued together. I’ve been heads down correcting some architectural sins that I had made, which opened the door to saving the game. You can now coherently progress:

There are a few things here; I didn’t show the new game flow (it does exist), but you start on a point, engage in a conflict, and then can experience encounters.

A little while back, I reached out to an author who specialized in game narrative design. After some discussions, we did a trial, and I’ve started implementing some of the content. I think it’s a good fit; we’re going to continue to expand on the lore and world building that I’ve documented in the GDD, and I’m going to focus on the mechanics.

The encounters in this video came from that trial; there’s still some copyediting and implementation (I intentionally left the TODO in), but the point is that it works. Behind the scenes, Yarn Spinner’s saliency is making choices about what is showing, and I wired the variable storage to my save system.

So, what sins did I commit? A lot of early architecture was focused around the conflict system, which mechanically is the most complex. Great, but things like a toolbar shouldn’t require a combat configuration. The combat adjudicator shouldn’t be a global autoload. Stuff like that, which I reworked, streamlined, and compartmentalized. The toolbar now correctly gets setup values and then listens for events to update and doesn’t know anything about how or why.

There’s some more music in there, and I’m going to redo some of the earlier music. I had made a decision on the key and mode; G Locrian double-flat 7. There’s a great video by Ben Levin - The FORBIDDEN Mode which deeply inspired me. I’ve also gotten better at making seamless music loops and logic, so I’ll revisit them. I had originally planned for several different songs for combat on each stage, so this will be a good time to build up that library.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned what I did with the music for combat; there’s a parameter for tension based on how much damage you’ve taken. The more damage, the tenser the music gets. I used FMOD to do this, and it’s great, but dang it’s obtuse. I think I’d like to do a follow-up talk with RocGameDev about music and sound design for games, except this time with a focus on FMOD and Godot. A few years ago, I watched some behind the scenes work on the DOOM soundtrack and saw that technique, and now I’m using it on my indie game. That’s just cool. I’ll write more about it when I have time to focus.

Now that the save system works, I need to implement the stage boss sequence; conversation, conflict, and resolution. With that in place, that’s honestly a vertical slice. I’ll polish the content, resolve TODOs, and make every mechanic work. For example, the author had thought energy was a finite currency, and at one point it was, but it’s no longer, so instead I’m going to make one-shot devices that give you a boost of energy during combat. I’ll clean up the music, add a couple more opponents, some more encounters, implement a reward system at the end of combat.

At that point, I think I’ll be ready for a real play test. That’s terrifying. But, that’s the whole point of what I’ve been doing; building that MVP, the Minimally Viable Product, that is tangible enough that you can have coherent opinions about what this game is going to be.

Man, I’m going to need some art on this and not just placeholder squares (although they are growing on me in a Thomas Was Alone way).

This is real progress. Now, to finish it.

When I make something that people engage with unexpectedly, it throws me off. After I wrote and published the factory introduction, I did some site optimizations to fix some bugs and speed up content delivery, then drove a couple hours and camped in a state forest with no internet. I hiked with my daughters and drank cider by a fire. At the end of the weekend, I saw that my BlueSky post had gotten the most engagement up to this point. I mean, that’s the point, but I never assumed it would land. That’s really cool, and I sincerely appreciate it. Really glad I optimized the site!