Ever have a conversation with a sentient factory? With YarnSpinner for GDScript, you can!

There’s a lot to unpack here, so let’s take a step back.

I had the skeleton of a game, but not the connective tissue; the pieces existed, but there wasn’t a cohesive experience, a sense of moving from A to B. I’ve been working at adding persistence, which has taken some rearchitecture.

I’ve implemented working Outposts, where you can buy and sell things, repair your ship, and more. It’s been in various stages of working for almost two weeks. However, I haven’t shared it yet because “it’s not ready.”

At an Outpost, you can:

• Repair your hull
• Buy Schematics, which are permanent cross-run upgrades that allow you to craft devices
• Craft Devices from a Schematic (For a cost)
• Sell Devices (at a loss)
• Buy Devices
• Chat with the Outpost AI
• Attack the Outpost, although this is a bad idea
• Just leave

I had to make several new data types, build user interfaces, implement state machines, and write some music (my eldest daughter asked for something like Digital Circus). There’s even a little display screen in the lower-left that shows contextual text about each action. It’s not a mockup, it all works. So, why didn’t I show it off?

I worked on map generation over a month ago, then set it aside; I was spinning wheels on rendering and prioritized the conflict loop instead. It’s back and more robust.

My implementation is a directed acyclic graph; you start from the root node and have a series of choices about where you can go, eventually narrowing down to a single terminal node. Traversal works (disabling nodes you can’t visit), and since the nodes are practically buttons, I got controller navigation for free (ish).

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.

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 was ambitious in my goals last week, but it’s paid off. I’ve got a preliminary title screen, scenario selection, and a whole lot more under the hood.

I started by moving away from JSON Schema. Sounded good on paper, but I found myself in an anti-pattern, fighting the Godot way of doing things. I have now formally structured into classes (which I had before) and Godot-managed resources (instead of dynamically creating them at runtime).