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

🪵🌿 Devlog Day 17 — Centralizing the Systems (June 12, 2025)

✅ Progress Made

• Finished building out the Unified Item Data System:
  • Created ItemType enum to cover all item categories I’ll need.
  • Built ItemData to handle full item properties: names, stack sizes, icons, prices, and descriptions.
  • Set up ItemDatabase as a global singleton where all item data lives.
  • Fully hooked it into my existing inventory, gathering, and merchant systems.
• Completed the Merchant Inventory System:
  • Added MerchantInventory class to handle individual merchant stock.
  • Built the MerchantManager singleton to load and store merchant inventories.
  • Created two example merchants: “Doc” and “Generalist” with appropriate item lists.
• Refactored resource gathering to finally clean up all that duplicate code:
  • Created HarvestableResource as a generic base class.
  • Simplified both Tree and Boulder to inherit from the base class with just 1 line of code.
  • Used exported variables to easily assign resource type, amount, and health directly in the editor.
• Updated Inventory UI to fully connect to the centralized item data:
  • Inventory icons now dynamically load directly from ItemDatabase.
  • No more hardcoded icon paths — it’s all unified and flexible for expansion now.
• Squashed a small issue with icon loading after updating my singletons (forgot to reload the autoload — classic Godot moment).

⚠ Challenges

• Ran into a null reference error when the icons weren’t loading. Turned out to just be me forgetting to reload my updated global.
• Took things a bit lighter today due to poor sleep last night — shifted focus into system cleanup and polish instead of adding new mechanics.

🚀 Next Steps

• Start work on the Shrine Sacrifice System (third major system that will tie directly into the economy loop).
• Once Shrine is done, I’ll have a functional merchant-shrine-crafting economy to build off of.
• Slowly start migrating any older systems over to the new unified item structure as I revisit them.

🧠 Reflection

Even though this was technically a “light” day, I got a lot of important cleanup and architecture work done that’s going to save me headaches down the road. Centralizing item data was one of the best decisions I’ve made so far — it’s already making adding new systems so much smoother. Every piece I refactor like this makes future systems faster to build, easier to debug, and way more maintainable long-term.

Very happy with how much cleaner my codebase is starting to feel.