Two things happened recently. The first is that I played Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, and it is the first game in years that truly captured me. I finished the main story - possibly the second time in my adult life I've finished a single-player game of over 5 hours - and then immediately jumped into endgame content, and started a second playthrough. Expedition 33 has become my favourite single-player game of all time.

The second thing that happened was that I watched a DougDoug video where he taught a couple of his friends to code. I've long been a fan of the way DougDoug brings coding into his streams and videos, but something about him showing a couple of new coders the ropes triggered something in me. I've been a software dev for over a decade now, but I've been losing passion for it. Recently, I've even mentioned to a few colleagues that I straight up don't like coding these days. So I was surprised when I suddenly had the urge to give game development a try again - and even more surprised when a few days later I was still enjoying the process and getting deeper into it than I have before, with a concept that feels like it might actually be something.

Untitled RPG

My previous (few and very basic) game dev projects were largely in Unity, but for this one I've jumped over to Godot. Even 3 days into using Godot, I'm already finding it more user-friendly for the basic game that I'll be making. I'm sure I'm building on some previous knowledge of how some of this stuff works that I picked up in Unity as well, but this project is progressing much faster than any of the older ones.

So what am I actually making? From my design document:

Untitled RPG will be a small top-down 2D game with a hybrid turn-based/real-time combat system inspired by Expedition 33. Positioning will also be a factor, with dodges moving the character around the battle-map. The game will use a TTRPG setting called Hokori that I've been developing separately - a fantasy setting with Japanese and Nordic influences.

I'm looking to take cues from Expedition 33 to make the moment to moment combat feel satisfying. The turn based system for your attacks allowing the player to strategize combined with the real time parry/dodge system forcing the player to stay engaged in the moment is one of the greatest mechanical innovations I've experienced in gaming and I want to see what I can do with it.

I'll likely post more about the Hokori setting as I develop it as well - I've been working on it for a few months now, and it stood out immediately as the obvious choice for a setting for this game.

So where am I up to? Well...bad UI and placeholder art:

But hey, it's a start!

So far I have:

• A basic hero and enemy definition
• A basic combat turn system
• Placeholder audio for attacks
• Placeholder animation and screen shake for attacks
• The skeleton of an actions system
• Health tracking and combat ending

Coming up next is fleshing out the actions system a little so that I can get a very basic proof of concept for the combat system:

• Two player characters in the battle at once
• Choice between a couple of different actions (Heavy/Light/Ranged attack potentially)
• Enemy cycles between two different attack styles (Single/Double attacks) targeting a random character

Once that's done I'll probably be looking to make a vertical slice of the game on the combat system - better UI, sprites, animations, sound effects and a battle setup screen where you select your party and enemies, plus a bunch more actions the heroes have access to. This will still all be placeholder stuff for now, but it'll be the base for future playtesting and look and feel a little nicer than it does now.