In this turn-based strategy game, you must defeat creatures to gather materials to craft and improve weapons and armor. Your gear will grant you special abilities and you’ll learn new moves to take on stronger and stronger opponents. Featuring a modern art aesthetic grown from traditional tile-based roots, this game promises to keep you coming back for just one more run.

Deliver on the Pitch

The pitch above is ambitious and highlights some of the key features I’m aiming to include in the game. At present, the game has:

• playable hero with mouse and keyboard controls
• functional (not final) equipment and inventory
• enemy combat with basic enemy AI
• retro-style CRT filter

Next Steps

I’m in the process of planning the next development cycle, which will (potentially) include:

• more enemies, beefy enemies
• loot drops and collectables
• customizable hero abilities and moves
• more locations
• integrated equipment and inventory
• updated UI

I’m hoping to release this game in 2024, which means I should get a Steam page set up sooner rather than later. I will probably focus in on key areas needed for a Steam page before venturing off into more fun areas of game development.

Newsletter

Join my newsletter! I’m planning on posting the occasional devlog as well as retrospectives on some other projects I’ve worked on. Pretty much everything is cross-posted here on my website if you’d prefer to read here. You can also follow me on mastodon, where I post updates occasionally.

Metrics!

I started this project somewhat proper in early November 2023 and put in a moderate effort to keep track of both my time and expenses.

Expenses

Importantly, there are a lot of ‘expenses’ that I’m not tracking as part of this project. Living expenses, electricity, computer, and any previously purchased software.

I’m not expecting any more dedicated expenses in the near term until I start working on a Steam page. Registering the game with Steam will cost $100 when we get there.

Time Tracking

Much of my time has been split among game development, web development, and blogging (like what I’m doing now). I feel confident that the coming months can be a somewhat steady steam of development after a bit of planning. My website still needs some TLC, but I’ll only be spending time on that occasionally.

Over the last ~2 months, I’ve spent 52.25 hours working across building my game, my website, and my newsletter.

Development Log

Thank you for reading this far. I’m excited about this project, and I’d like to show you how I got here.

Inspirations

• Monster Hunter is a series of action games where the player battles large monsters. Progression is determined by gear, so the only way to progress is to get materials from vanquished foes to build better equipment.

• Imbroglio is a mobile game by Michael Brough. Played on a small grid, this roguelike offers unique strategy in a minimal setting.

• MRMO Tarius is a wonderful artist who’s work I find inspiring.

• Kyzrati is developing Cogmind and I’ve enjoyed seeing them continue developing their masterpiece of a game.

• The Game Dev Field Guide Community has been wonderfully supportive as I’ve learned how to make games.

• Bob Nystrom’s roguelike celebration talk on game architecture was a wonderful kick in the pants to get me thinking about game development in new ways.

Musical Octo Goggles

My first pass at developing this type of game culminated in the unfinished Musical Octo Goggles. I have a build on itch.io that you can futz with, the password is playtester. The web build is quite buggy, but I enjoyed putting together the game architecture and mechanics. The format mimics Imbroglio, but without all the cool weapons and upgrade stuff.

Art Test - Stylized 2D/3D

Unhappy with the art and style of Musical Octo Goggles, I began tinkering to try to create a tilt-shift style similar to what you might see in Octopath Traveler. I’m really happy with how this turned out as well as everything I ended up learning about working with 3D. Shout out to Oryx Design Lab for their beautiful sprites as well as DevLogLogan for their intro to 3D tiles. There is absolutely no ‘game’ in the project, just stand-in visuals. I hope to return to this style someday, when I’m a bit more experienced.

New Project - Let’s try for real this time

In November 2023, I decided it was high time to make a real pass at making a game with enough polish to release on Steam. After a bit of planning, I decided to pursue gameplay like Imbroglio or Musical Octo Goggles with a progression system like Monster Hunter. Ideally, our hero would take on tough enemies for loot and use that loot to improve their chances at beating the next enemy. Since I already had some experience working with the movement and enemy systems, I started to look at inventory and equipment management.

Using a wonderful art pack from Kenney and a tutorial from DevLogLogan, I was able to get a nice inventory and equipment implementation up and running.

Getting Distracted 🐿️ Learning Web Development

In later November, I started thinking about how I wanted to market myself and my games, and how I want to start getting a small group of people ready to wishlist any game that I put out on Steam. Shout out to How to Market a Game, for their excellent repository of advice on this subject.

I decided to build my first website and start a newsletter

It has been so much fun!! I wrote up a blog post on my experience learning to make a website. I also started a newsletter where I can cross-post blogs and articles to be delivered to inboxes. If you haven’t yet, please subscribe to the newsletter or the rss feed! I wrote up a post on screenspace shaders in Godot, specifically some adventures into edge detection.

Return to the game

After that hard pivot to something completely new, I returned to the game to work on actual gameplay. The inventory and equipment were looking great. Over the next couple weeks:

• set up the arena and configured the hero to move on the grid
• purchased a beautiful tileset from MRMO Tarius
• spent a long time exercising art muscles to make the new forest arena
• configured the font from the tileset to work with Godot
• fiddled with mouse controls and some UI design
• added basic enemies with rudimentary combat
• added some basic UI with pathfinding

Conclusion

Thank you for reading all the way down to the end. I have had a great time working on this game, and I look forward to making more progress. I also look forward to documenting my journey and keeping you up-to-date on where things are headed.

In the meantime, please check out my other posts, either on my website or my newsletter. If you want to get in touch, you can follow me on mastodon or send me me an email ‘me [at] nuzcraft.com’.

Thank you!

- nuzcraft