This is a very early work-in-progress. I've been learning and building a month or so actively, building what I plan to eventually be a turn-based tactical game in the spirit of Gemfire, with a modern mentality toward mechanics, and inspirations from Dragon Force (the Saturn game), Fire Emblem, and Wargroove. I've made small games in the past, both physical and programmed, and currently DM a 5th Edition D&D campaign. I've tutored college-level C++ and have a strong background in programming fundamentals, though Godot and game programming structure is new to me. I haven't found many tutorials on this specific genre in Godot, but I've picked through tutorials in related genres to try to eke out the systems and structures I think I need.
I've built a basic design plan, trying to focus on a solid set of systems that provide interesting strategic and tactical choices and progressions, both at the macro and micro scales. (Admittedly a lot of this is intuition based on my math and gaming backgrounds, I haven't learned how to really apply statistical analysis here yet.) Variety of play-styles is planned through different available factions, each with different specialties and vulnerabilities, and a progression system that allows for customization from the 'kingdom' to the 'hero' scale.
I've worked together some of the basic tilesets to make it feel a little more legit, and organized thing as best I could with my limited experience so far. I'm targeting a SNES-style presentation with a higher resolution (ideally just high enough to still be able to visually register each pixel in the artwork). Full-screen overlays are planned for battle actions and game events, as well as modern shader and particle effects. The aesthetic I'm reaching for with the characters will be very anime/JRPG-inspired, bright and colorful, but not childlike. For UI/UX, I'm studying the presentation genius that is Persona 5 in the hopes of distilling down everything they did right, and adapting it to what I hope will be a unified blend of the old pixel style and the new vibrant and dynamic energy coming out of Japan.
That's what I hope for anyway. I've got a decent start, but I'm a novice, and going is slow as I'm working through the overall structure. I've got the battle map set up to load whatever level I throw at it, and I wrapped my head around the tilemap features well enough to be able to throw levels together fast (though balance and fun factor will be more difficult). I've got a functioning selection cursor that stays within its bounds and talks with the map to know what's under it, and with the battle controller to know when to be active. I've got different roles (classes) set up for the hero units with stats for each, and the ability to change the hero's role later, similar to the job system in Final Fantasy Tactics.
I'm working now on the turn controller; I haven't been able to find anything specific to team-based turns in the tuts I've been through, so I've been looking at more granular unit-based turn systems and trying to reason out how best to work out the system for mine. Probably overthinking it.
Anyway, nice to meet you all, this is my first post on the forum here. If anyone's been working on a similar project, or knows of any good resources to help me out on this, I'd love to hear from ya.
