Crouching Creature Combat, hidden tangents…
Combat is a cornerstone of the game’s core loop — it’s a wargame after all. If the creatures can’t attack or move, nothing else really works. So it felt like the perfect place to focus on getting one thing working at a time.
You know that feeling when you promise yourself to build just one simple feature… and then accidentally end up building half a combat system? Yeah. That happened.
I set out to make creature movement and attack work. Just that. And technically… I did.
But also…
So What Happened Since Last Time?
- Created a test creature
- Added stubs for abilities and creatures
- Can play the creature onto the world
- Creature can move
- Creature can attack (with a cheeky little “nudge” animation!)
- Creature is persistent in the world
- First version of a combat system is in place
- Height contributes to defence
- Combat uses dice rolls
- Added a UI element showing active units
Somewhere between “just movement and attack” and the inevitable barrage of scope creep that is this list… I may have overshot my initial scope a tiny bit.
The Big Question I Didn’t Think Through
When I first added creature cards, I realised something obvious but important:
“What happens to the card once the creature is played?”
Does it:
- 🃏 Get discarded like a one-off spell?
- 🏗️ Stay permanently on the battlefield, RTS-style?
- 🧍 Act more like an ally in Marvel Champions?
- ❄️ Or a unique character like in Undaunted?
I wasn’t sure which direction would be more fun, so I had a long chat with the AI to explore the implications of each — and in classic not-thinking-it-through fashion, this has the feeling of being a dramatic question that might shift the whole damn game all over again. Hello scope creep, my old friend. I’m trying to keep you in check this time, I promise — setting clearer boundaries for what belongs in the MVP and what gets kicked down the road for future me to deal with.
The key takeaway: I want players to get cards out fast , keep them on the board , and have those creatures feel unique. So the “remove from deck” idea (like Undaunted) felt too punishing. RTS swarm spam didn’t fit either.
The sweet spot seems to be something like Marvel Champions : unique characters with meaningful impact.
A Fun Rabbit Hole: Rewarding Combat
This led me to thinking: what happens when you win a combat?
That’s when Battle Realms came to mind — an underrated, vibey-as-hell RTS from way back, with samurai, werewolves, vampires, and mystical Eastern weirdness. It used combat to generate resources for upgrades.
I love that idea. It adds stakes and momentum to battles without punishing players for losing units. And in yet another stunning moment of self-realisation, I promptly undid all my changes related to this feature — because it was scope creep of the highest order!
UI Tangents and Side Quests
UI clarity is what really shapes how the game feels to play, so making it intuitive is critical. When the interface gets in the way, the whole experience slows down, so I’ve been extra sensitive about how these elements work.
Of course, I also got distracted by UI.
Playing a card and then having it disappear so you can see where to place it just makes sense. So I ended up tinkering with creature display windows and UX polish far beyond what I planned. I also found myself wrestling with the active unit display — trying (and failing repeatedly) to get Claude and Codex to understand exactly what I wanted changed. It turns out it’s surprisingly difficult to use plain English to precisely specify how a UI element should behave.
But I did get a shiny radial menu for unit actions out of it…
The Actual Goal? Achieved.
At the end of the day, I really did achieve what I set out to do:
✅ Creature movement and attack — working (ish) 🌀 Plus a whole lot of unexpected side questing, because game dev is never a straight line.
Next Steps
Onward to the next rabbit hole.
This sprint was messy but productive — a reminder that even the tangents feed back into making the game feel more alive.
- Refine creature persistence and combat flow
- Continue working through the massive creature card spec doc — I barely made it through the first two abilities, and I still want to explore resource generation and upgrades from combat wins
- Keep iterating without accidentally building a full-blown RTS 😅
TL;DR: I aimed for one thing. I built a small ecosystem. I’m proud, a little tired, and very excited about where this is going. And I’ve learned more about using AI tooling than I ever imagined.
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