hi, here's some stuff i've been thinking about concerning my deckbuilder game 'fly' (working title). aka first devlog i guess.
in general/about me:
- idea lived in my head in different guises during 2025, started development in september.
- i used to make tons of unfinished games in qbasic as a kid, then turbopascal for a spell. then didn't do game development for 30 years because i got distracted by things (and also by some stuff as well).
- in those 30 years i did a lot of (copy)writing and illustration for different projects. i also co-founded a company but it turned out i was also confounding the company. i left early 2025 due to shenanigans.
- suddenly i had time on my hands and decided to start learning a game engine and make a game. investigated unity and godot but realized i am more of a non-codey, quick 'concept2execution' kinda person, so opted to learn gdevelop. was a good choice i think, as i was able to hit the ground semi-running after learning the basics. happily, much of the programming logic i'd picked up as a kid was still in tact despite years of hedonistic living.
- after doing a tutorial (asteroids) i started on 'fly'. i was going to make a simple flappy bird clone but didn't want to be too boring, so the bird became a fly and instead of up and down you'd move to the front and back in an attempt to avoid those sticky fly paper thingies. very original i know thanks!
- being a deckbuilder fan (especially shlay das shpire), cards were added as a mechanic. not having cards just wasn't feasible.
- since it's impossible to make your first game idea too complicated, i moved away from the flappy clone and let the idea be what it wanted to be : a procedurally generated grid-based strategic deckbuilder with hundreds of cards, items, events, enemies, a story of course, multiple playable characters, memorable npcs, and tons of replay value. still seeming a little slight, i decided i would also be doing music and sfx myself.
- realizing the idea was getting a little amibitious and would take multiple weeks to execute, i consciously ignored that realization and set out to make the game anyway. i would finish a game for once, even if it took a whole month, or even two!
- i now realize this is going to take years.
- to stay motivated, i am looking to share updates here and hopefully keep pushing the game to completion. i'll share monthly updates on my learnings, ponderings, progress, etc.
here's what i've cooked up in september 2025:
- made a cardboard prototype of the idea and played it with friends. this made me ask a lot of hard questions about the intended mechanics, which was great. i probably would've gotten dejected had i run into these questions down the line.
- produced a 40-slide design document outlining the scope of the game. lol
- spent a couple of days working on a logo. lol
- produced placeholder assets in procreate (player, enemy, first 20 cards, tiles to create the grid, drawpile and discard pile sprites). having spent days on a logo, the goal here was speed, not quality.
- built the grid, randomly placed the player and enemies on it in random orientations.
- built the card draw functionality. i created different array variables for all the cards in the game: the player deck (pre-populated with the starter cards), the drawpile (from the player deck), and the discard pile. spent quite some time getting this to work properly. gdevelop's extensions and awesome community helped a lot.
- built the card drag, tile highlighting, card drop and player movement functionalities. when a card gets dragged, the tiles the player can move to are highlighted. dropping the card onto a highlighted tile tweens the player to that tile and discards the card.
- built player rotation functionality. when a rotation card gets dropped onto the player tile, they will rotate in the specified direction, discarding the card.
- added return-to-hand behavior for 'badly' dropped cards and hand re-organizing when a card is 'well-dropped'. (sorry don't know the industry terms.)
- created the card chaining functionality. dropping a movement card onto an enemy won't move the player, but prompt for an action card combo instead. subsequently dropping an action card onto the same enemy will attack it (in theory).
- realized there was a much better way to do the card chaining (namely, in-hand). i will have to bin a week of work; this project might take more than a month after all...
- procrastinating by writing a first devlog.
thanks for reading (if anyone did)! i'll get into more detail about the game in future devlogs. hope to see you next time.
—himpy
ps. since you've made it this far i'll throw in the initial sketch of the logo, as well as a version where i've beaten it to death in illustrator and realized i needed to move on with my life/game.
