WhileIterating's game – Devlog

A daily devlog documenting my journey building a turn-based RPG, with many other elements mixed in for fun, in Godot

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Project maintained by Brhando Hosted on GitHub Pages — Theme by mattgraham

⚔️ Day 11 Centralization, Combat Creation, and a New Dungeon UI – June 2, 2025

Progress Made

• Replaced the BattleScene.cs script with a new minimal bridge that simply passes entities to CombatManager.
• Fully centralized combat flow logic into the CombatManager singleton.
• Refactored DungeonUi.cs to dynamically read skill names from PlayerData and reflect them on the appropriate UI buttons.
• Connected Skill 1 and Skill 2 to ExecutePlayerSkill, and confirmed both execute correctly via stamina and action cost checks.
• Fixed blessing names in SkillData so that "Prayer" and "Whirlwind" populate properly on UI load.
• Wired animations to play correctly after skill use with timed transitions and enemy hurt responses.
• Connected end turn logic and resolved a bug where the End Turn button remained disabled.
• Finalized working interaction between pressing a skill, applying its effect, and watching it animate and reduce enemy HP successfully.

Challenges

• Button press handlers were wired, but skills weren’t executing because UseSkill() was silently failing on stamina or action cost checks.
• Skill4 (“Prayer”) wasn’t displaying due to a missing .Name field in the skill dictionary.
• EndTurn button logic was disabling the button in both if and else blocks—fixed with a simple logic patch.
• Needed to manually trigger damage to apply to enemies (one missing line of code).

Next Steps

• Connect remaining skill buttons (3–5) once effects are finalized.
• Begin implementing post-combat transitions (Victory button and scene management).
• Expand enemy skills and turn logic.
• Consider adding visible feedback for active buffs or status effects.
• Build a cleaner damage UI system or combat log for clarity during fights.

Reflection

Today marked the moment everything clicked. After refactoring my entire combat flow into the CombatManager, I no longer needed to juggle logic across scattered scripts—everything finally feels centralized, coherent, and scalable. It was deeply satisfying to press a skill button, see the animation play, and watch my custom-designed enemy sprites react with damage and hurt feedback.

The prayer system felt especially rewarding to see functioning correctly—it’s one of the most thematic pieces of the design and really represents the kind of layered, strategic combat I want to build this game around. Getting the button UI to reflect dynamic skills based on the weapon-class relationship added to that immersion.

I hit a few snags—like the End Turn button logic and some silent stamina failures—but they were all easy fixes once I stopped and thought through them. I now have a battle system that feels alive, and that’s no small feat. With this in place, the game’s foundation is solid enough to grow from. The fun part is just beginning.