One of the ideas I had come across while surfing other WordPress game development blogs was working on a Game Design Document (Reddit has good examples). I started trying to describe in words what I was getting at, then I realized how crap that was and decided to muck about in Gimp and just edit me a concept art of what the battle system looks like.

I’ve described a bit of the action bar system I’m going for, but I’m hoping to make a light deck based battler, where you tell all your peeps what commands you want them to do and then they do it. Because this is entirely a concept art, I just copy pasted the same exact power bar for each of them, but at least it does the “worth a thousand words” thing well enough for now, and I can edit it later.

Unfortunately, doing this just increased my awareness that I have a large learning curve ahead of me. In no particular order:

• Create the engine. There’s a great tutorial on making Slay the Spire in Godot that I would be remiss in not poring over every detail. I don’t actually know how to do much of it, but this would give me a good start on how to create at least something like the interface, and modify it from there
• Learn to sprite: Step one is very clearly learning the shortcuts, but is definitely an easy enough tool for the job. I’m not too shabby at drawing, although its mostly cartooning – but this guide does a great job explaining how you go from either a paper and pen doodle or a drawing tablet doodle and spritify it. Spritefy? These both seems like perfectly cromulent words.
• I did learn one good trick for making monsters for battlers. Stable Diffusion has a very nice transparent background setting, and while you still need to do a little bit of manual effort on the shadows, it sure beats using the magic wand tool. Check out this random dog I denuded from its very exciting background:

• The card art will take a lot of thinking. They’ll have to be recognizable at a glance; the typical format of a Magic the Gathering card, with title, cost, image panel, effect and flavor text, times three action bars, is going to involve a lot of squinting and reading glasses. While I won’t be needing costs on the cards, I will need the rest. I’d planned on doing this using Stable Diffusion, but maybe sprite art will have to suffice.

So yeah. No real progress update on this; actually, rather the opposite. More a sense of how much I’ll need to grasp before making actual progress versus pretend progress with photoshop.