Learning Godot: My Journey to Creating a Turn-Based Strategy Game

PancakeGenie

Update [0.031023]

Summary
Hi all, I've been spending some time on UI work, logic adjustments, and a bit of modeling lately. While there's still much to learn and refine, the project is coming along. The codebase is getting quite extensive, making it a bit more difficult to keep track of everything. I'm considering adding more comments for clarity, although I usually rely on well-named methods, variables, and classes to keep things understandable.

What's New:

Building Hotkeys: Simplifying player interactions, you can now use hotkeys for selecting and building structures, eliminating the need for repeated button clicks.
New Building - Barracks: A humble addition to the game. The Barracks model follows a similar aesthetic to the Archery Range. It's designed to be efficient with a minimal vertex count and shares the same color palette texture as previous models.
Revamped Building Selection UI: The previous UI had sections for "Battle," "Resource," and "Economy," which felt cumbersome to navigate. The new UI layout places all these elements under one umbrella but categorizes them for easier navigation. Added a bit of smoothness to the transitions as well, thanks to Godot's Tweening capabilities.
Drag-and-Move Building:: A small but handy change—while dragging the map to explore, any "ghost" buildings you're holding won't be canceled. The building will only be placed once you stop moving the map.
Building Canceling: Added the ability to cancel "ghost" buildings using the "Escape" key, right-click, or "B" key to select a new building. A tiny feature that makes a big difference in gameplay fluidity.
Civilization Colors: All civilizations now share the same building models, but the building colors change depending on the chosen civilization. In the future, players will have the option to customize these colors. This change required a slight alteration in rendering, requiring two draw calls instead of one.
OtherChanges:
- Instant Placement: Now, buildings appear immediately on the selected tile.
- Build Rule: You must deselect a selected building to build another.
- File Format: Switched from .GLB to .OBJ for models.
- Resource Icon Positions: Slight improvements to resource icon placements on the screen.
- UI Hotkeys: Building hotkeys are now displayed in the UI.

Tomcat

PancakeGenie File Format: Switched from .GLB to .OBJ for models.

What's the reason for the change? What are the disadvantages and advantages?

PancakeGenie

Tomcat Ah, because I needed only the mesh so that I can place it directly on the Packed Scene with MeshInstance3D as root component.

Each building has the same two materials: Color Palette and Civ Color. So, for the whole game I only need a two material resource objects that I apply to every unwraped model. This makes it so the renderer finishes rendering in only two drawcalls (because all of the models use the same material). At least this is how Unity did it.

I never used .GLB but it seems to be that there is no easy way to add resource material to it. Also, it creates a packed scene that I can't edit by placing StaticBody3D and CollisionShape3D under it.

I didn't play with .GLB long enough and I am much more familiar with the .FBX or .OBJ formats in games.

PancakeGenie

Update [0.061023]

Summary

Though my birthday celebrations and diving into procedural generation in another project ate into some development time this week, I still managed to make some important updates to the game. Let's dive into what's new.

What's New:

Turns: After some development effort, a turn-based system has now been implemented into the game. Each game will have a last turn capped at 65,535. While this might seem like an arbitrary number, it's set high enough that it should never become a limiting factor in any game scenario.
Building Delay: The instant build mechanism has been replaced with a more realistic building delay feature. Now, constructing a building takes a specific number of turns based on what you're trying to build. For instance, a Barracks will now require 2 turns to complete, and a Market will take 3 turns. The visuals for this feature are still in the works, but functionally, it's operational.

In addition to these updates, I've made a number of bug fixes and logic alterations to ensure a smooth integration of the new "Turn system".

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