Boat Game Dev Log #1 ⛵

Week one on my New Year's resolution to complete a commercial game is a wrap and I'm happy to report: not a zero percent day occurred! Behold what a weeks worth of development can do!

It's an okay start.

Change Log 📖

• Added Custom Resources for items.
• Created an inventory drag-n-drop menu for base stash
• Created inventory display for player in top right
• Added a cannon turret.
• Turret reloading system
• Build system improvements
  • Turrets can be placed wherever the player is facing and the distance can be adjusted
  • Buildings can't collide with existing buildings or player, displaying a red transparent material if they do
  • Turret being built can be selected, information from the turret item resource is displayed
• Interaction system added where player is prompted to interact with items their reticle hovers and a transparent white material is overlayed onto the object

Wait, What is this Game? 🤨

It's Boat Game. can't you read?

To be less sardonic about it: I'm making a tower defense game where the hook is that you're the one running around, doing logistics like hauling ammo and new turrets and it's on the ocean. In my head, I have more direction then that, however, I think concealing a little of my plans will lead me to work harder so I can get the anticipation of showing my ideas off, rather then talk about it. Lots of dev logs are like that, filled with ambition about the author's 'Dream Game', but lacking in the real substance of the everyday work of development. I don't plan on knitting any golden fleeces here, no sir, I'm weaving a wicker chair that'll make it five, seven years if I'm lucky. ¹

System Forbles ⚙

Truthly, I don't have much 'game' right now to show, which is in some ways backwards because conventional rapid-game-development logic is that you get a core game dev loop first, then iterate on top of that since if you start writing systems first, like menus, serialization, object hierarchies, ect… you may end up building a nice framework for a game, but the game itself could still suck.

On the other hand: I've already past the 'Fun Threshold' on my game, which I describe as: "The point in game development which you first have fun playing your own game". It happened when I reloaded a turret, after I realized I didn't instantiate it with ammo and an enemy was about to blow up my base, but the turret got him in just the nick of time. So, I feel like I'm free to screw around in system land for a bit.

Custom Resources 📦

In the Godot Game Engine, there's a concept called "Resources" which is just fancy speak for "a class that is serializable and can be slapped into some of our editor tooling", which, as it turns out, is just the kind of crazy, simple approach that is very useful in a complex game engine! Of course, you can define your own resources² and I've begun to create a system that roughly looks like this:

• ItemResoruces
  • All possible fields for Ammo, Stash, Turret
  • …
  • Item_def
    • AmmoResource
    • StashResource
    • TurretResource

And I have a few folders with different definitions for ammo, stashes, and turrets. When I want to create a new instance of a custom resource, I merely ask Godot to create something like an AmmoResource fill in some values in the sidebar, and I'm done. I have a data container I can pass through inventories, display descriptions for in different UI context, store in turrets, whatever.

Of course, they're a few winkles and gotchas, like, each resource is one resource and they're passed by reference, which Is why I have an ItemResource that wraps the resource def with all the fields³. But the advantage is having data containers that can be serialized and thrown about however I please. Nice.

Inventory 🍱

Nothing is more satisfying and more awful then writing a drag-n-drop inventory.

Thankfully, I have a cheat: I've done this before:

It's very simple:

• The inventory panels have a reference to the inventory they represent, as well as callbacks on what to do when an item is removed or added
• A "grabbed Item" is hidden from view initially and displayed as a 'dumb' icon that just follows the mouse
• When a "grabbed Item" is dropped, both panels receive a signal and handle the case appropriately
  • If the item was ours and dropped in another panel, call remove_item(grabbed_item)
  • If the item was ours and dropped in our panel, just show it again
  • If a new item was dropped in our panel, call add_item(grabbed_item)
• If our inventory ever changes, just scorch all visual elements and redraw them

And it's just that easy. Or maybe not, give me a month with this and we'll see how I feel.

The Build System 🏗️

If placing a building in a tower defense sucks, then the game sucks.

At this point I have placement that:

• aligns with the player camera, so turrets can be placed at any angle in proximity to the player
• Adjustable distance from player via the scroll wheel⁴
• Only checks flat plan radius between other objects to guarentee no intersections, shows a green material for valid placement, red for invalid
• Data about the turret being placed is shown

Likely I'll iterate over this a couple times in development to get something "just right" where players can rapidly place, build, upgrade, reload, whatever buildings and they can do it rapidly without having to think about it. My antithesis for this is Fallout 4, which, with it's horrendous build ui that was built for xbox controls, managed to convince me not to spend another 200 hours of my life playing another Bethesda RPG.

Organizing the Work ✅

In order to keep things nice and tidy, I have an Org document, within my Org-Roam database with just about everything related to this project:

It's a real nice to have since I can look back at my day and, even if it didn't feel like I got anything done, I can prove to myself that yes, I am a productive individual. I know what you might be thinking: "Do you really need a text document to tell you that?" and yes, I am a fallible human being who can't do it alone so I brought my Pulaski in the form of a markup file.

The Marketing Plan 📈

Yeah, we're talking about marketing a week into this because I already have a deadline(February 14th 2025) and that means certain dates have to be met to maximize profits.

First up is by Mid-August I need a Steam page setup. This is important since launching with a certain amount of wish lists on the platform is critical to getting certain visibility boosts, like the "New & Trending" tab, and to grow wish lists I need time, and hopefully six months will be enough to get the 7,000 to 9,000 I'll need to make that happen. For a successful page, I need:

• A Trailer representative of the game play I intend to have(can probably achieve this solo in two weeks of work)
• A professionally illustrated capsule image(estimated about a month of lead time from someone on art station I can commission)
• A consistent visual style(Perhaps unobtainable. We'll see)

After that, my marketing begins in earnest with posting on TikTok⁵, messaging other game devs in related genres for collaboration opportunities, and probably Reddit involvement.

After the Mid-August steam page upload, the next most important milestone will be Steam Next Fest, either Fall or December depending on how dates line up. That'll be the big exposure push to get a demo out that will garner feedback and ensure the release is up to par without any obvious issues.

Next Week

A lot of foundational work was done this week, so I've got high hopes that'll have more of a game loop and visual improvements to show off come next Wednesday.

Footnotes

• ¹ My favorite chair was a wicker one that I slowly tore apart the arms of year after year. I'm pretty sure it was rained on and ruined at some point.
• ² The best case for these things is made here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzRZjM9MTGw
• ³ I'm assuming it won't be a problem so long as the serialization recongnizes those fields are blank and does allocate space for them…
• ⁴ This may change since scroll wheel naturally becomes about "selection" for most people. Fun experiment though
• ⁵ If you aren't aware, Tiktok is gas for games marketing, despite being a brain parasite(and maybe because it's one? 🤔)