Staying Motivated and Focused
Balancing Priorities
This week, I focused more on family and personal priorities, which left a little less time for game development. But that’s exactly why I’m writing these blog posts alongside the project! I squeezed in an hour or two this week to make some progress and keep the project moving forward.
Pathfinding Ideas
I spent some time brainstorming ideas for pathfinding around units. One idea I came up with is to maintain a list of occupied tiles and remove those from the pathfinding system. I’m not sure if this approach will stick, but it’s a starting point.
To test the idea, I created a BattleManager script and added a function for spawning units. Right now, it just spawns units, but I’m sure I’ll expand this script further as the project progresses. I also set up unit tests to ensure the functionality is working as intended.
Reflecting on Unit Testing
Setting up the unit tests sparked some new thoughts. I realized I should start adding gameplay mechanics that allow me to actually play the game, not just test isolated features. I’m not sure where this fits into a TDD workflow, but I’ll figure it out as I go. For now, I’m still leaning on ChatGPT to help write tests, but I feel like the regression tests are incredibly important!
I’m also planning to play Gladius for a bit to analyze how its selection UI works. I love the idea of incorporating full controller support into my game, and Gladius feels like the perfect inspiration for that.
Improving My UI Skills
UI design is something I’ve always struggled with, and it’s an area I’d like to improve. I’m debating when to dive into the UI for this project—I might start researching good examples online soon. UI has always been tricky for me, both in game development and in my day job as a developer.
Scene Organization in Godot
Another area I’ve been thinking about is how to structure my scenes in Godot. I want my nodes to be well-organized and easy to manage as the project grows! I’ve found a lot of inspiration from Godot Game Lab on YouTube. I followed along with his Slay the Spire recreation series and even converted all the GDScript into C#, which you can check out here: Godot 4 Card Game in C#.
I’d love to explore his season 2 content eventually, but for now, my focus is on stabilizing this project.
Planning Ahead
One thing I’m excited about is planning a simple overworld scene and thinking through what data needs to transfer into the battle scene. This is something I tackled years ago in Unity, and I think it’s complex enough to warrant its own roadmap in my GitHub Project. I’ll add that soon!
I can’t wait to look back at these early stages once the project is complete and see how far things have come.
Final Thoughts
While I wish I had a bit more time to devote to game development, I feel good about how I’m balancing this hobby with the rest of my life. Prioritizing family and other responsibilities is really important to me—more so than making progress on the game.
Tonight, after posting this, I plan to revisit my project board and update it with my next steps.
Thanks for reading, and as always, I appreciate the moral support!