Mouse interactions are staying; I’ve been focused on adding natural controller navigation. There’s a lot of controller interactions that we take for granted that when implemented cleanly just feels natural, but that hides a bit of a mountain of helpful logic. I’ve been thinking about it this way; the player wants to know what card they’re looking at, which card is selected, and what target that card is going to. Practically, hover the card they chose, highlight when selected, then choose a target. It’s also valid to want to choose actions elsewhere on the screen, like configuring a game mechanic or opening a menu. Godot has some built in helpers for knowing which button is closest… but not everything is a button.

I’m making some solid progress on my new game now, and I find myself getting distracted as I start tweaking the content. This is a good thing; it means that I’m getting a lot closer to a vertical slice that I can put in front of people and ask for their opinions. Some major changes from last week:

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: