I didn't get to spend much time to work on my game this past week but I still managed to make meaningful progress. Most of the changes I made was from refactoring except for these neat weapons I made!

In the top-right corner of the player inventory on the right half of the screen, do you see the three blue tiles stacking vertically? I call that a dagger. I call the taller pink item next to it a scepter. Each tile contributes to a damage type if it sits in the active column.

So, on turns 1 and 10 of the GIF above, the player deals 3 strength damage because of the three blue tiles. On turns 2 and 11, the player then deals 5 magic damage from the scepter. As you can imagine, the player can deal massive damage at once by stacking items vertically, or spread the damage over several turns by placing them horizontally. Some next steps and things I need to figure out soon:

Since last week, I've updated the tiles to something less distracting and closer to the art style I can create. I can't wait to learn pixel art, by the way — I already bought Aseprite but have managed to hold off using it for now.

I added icons for strength and magic weapons. Right now each weapon is a 16x16 sprite, but I want them to span multiple tiles — a sword in the player's inventory would look like the letter "t," a staff like the letter "l." You get the picture.

I also learned about Camera2d's limit method, which stops the camera from following the character so it can expose the level's bounds. Before I found it, I'd planned to detach the camera from the player and lock it onto a tile whenever the level's edges came into view. Setting limits was much easier.

I'm surprised to find myself so engaged in this Godot game project. I didn't think my gaming time would ever be less than my game dev'ing time but here I am.

Since you've last heard from me, I created a grid layout for the player and enemy to traverse. So now I have two grids I'm working with: the player inventory and the level map. Throughout the codebase I have them named inventory_tile and map_tile to easily distinguish the difference. I've already tripped up once on confusing these two.

As you can see, I added pixel art! Not mine, of course. I grabbed this free tile set from Kenney and am using it as a placeholder until I learn how to create my own pixel art. For now, my lil' dwarf guy will be the player. He spawns in the first open tile that has at least one adjacent open tile to move to, can move to other open tiles but bumps into walls, has health, turns red on hit, and rotates 90º on death. Oh, my!

If I'm able to build the game I'm envisioning in my head, it will be a turn-based inventory management roguelite dungeon crawler. I've started building the inventory part of the game and I'm happy with the results so far.

I'm using Claude as a mentor. It helps point me to the right documentation, provides best practice solutions so I'm creating good Godot habits from the start, and most importantly, since I'm familiar with JavaScript, I ask it to translate what I know from that language to GDScript so I can better understand. I can go into more detail about using Claude as a mentor in a future post, but I just wanted to make it clear that Claude does not write the code for me. It doesn't even spit out code snippets for me to copy and paste. I think AI should be used as a tool and never as a complete replacement for a human bean.

To get started, I needed to answer one easy question after another: How do I make a square? A ColorRect. How do I make a vertical stack of ColorRects? Put them into a VBoxContainer. How do I make five of those stacks sit side-by-side with one another? Put them in a GridContainer.

This went on for a while until I came up with something like this:

I’m a master of excuses and I’ve made plenty in the past two years to avoid writing this blog post. My excuses? I didn’t know what to write about, and nothing excited me enough to write about it.

That ends today. I am going to write about developing my first indie game.

Before I get into that, a quick summary of me. I’m a front-end software engineer working full-time from home. I’ve built websites professionally since 2020, but I’ve played video games for much, much longer.

To keep my first post short, I’m combining those two interests to learn indie game development. Funny enough, that means learning even more disciplines I’m interested in: UX design, art, narrative writing, marketing, and much, much more.