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.

A cover image for the Skirmish Prototype

After some research, I learned about the Casino War variation. I didn’t want to have a betting mechanic, but I was inspired by the idea of influencing the outcome by applying resources. There’s no psychological modeling or bluffing here; if you add more resources, the opponent has to match. If you run out of resources or cards, you lose. This works, but it’s still not a meaningful choice, and I feel player agency is very important. It still felt like it was lacking something.

Gameplay from Skirmish

The state you see here was not the final state; I had taken it a bit further and started adding a mechanic that I’ve since removed from the prototype and used as a key mechanic for an original game, solving the problems I perceived. I’ve been working on the new project since, but I paused to release Skirmish as a historical snapshot.

Features:

  • Menu, Credits, Game, with music for each
  • Abstracted Buttons with hover states, sound, mouse & keyboard navigation
  • Full deck of cards - front and back - with animated movement
  • State management (code organization)
  • Strict typing (best practices)
  • GUT unit testing (code quality)
  • gdlint and gdformat configuration (best practices)
  • Git project (best practices)

I decided against implementing a full build system; the binaries are manually exported. The Windows binary is unsigned, and I didn’t export macOS. These are things I’ll need to consider moving forward.

This was a solid learning experience, and it definitely informed how I’m approaching my next project.

I’ve been making good progress on the next project; I have a number of pages of diagrams and wireframes, and I’ve started implementing some early interfaces. It feels good to be making some substantial progress!