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 18: Combat Refactor (2024-06-15)

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Progress Made

• Made the decision to start a full refactor to ensure the bones of the project are strong before building more complex systems and expanding content.
• Completed full decoupling of combat skill execution.
• Fully modularized Skill, SkillResult, and SkillData.
• Added complete PlayerData stat separation for permanent state (damage, stamina, block, bonuses).
• Re-architected CombatManager to manage:
  • Turn flow
  • Chain buffs
  • Prayer system integration
  • Enemy death handling
  • Async-safe skill resolution.
• Implemented full async safety patterns to handle disposed object exceptions after dungeon room transitions.
• Verified proper dungeon target resets and state transitions.
• Successfully pushed stable refactor milestone to Git with clean commit message.

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Challenges

• Felt overwhelmed at times trying to keep track of all the changes being made and making sure nothing critical was accidentally broken or left out.
• Some frustration from needing a lot of guidance to ensure abstractions were being done correctly.
• The process of cleaning up and deleting old code while carefully rebuilding systems made the fear of “breaking everything” feel very real at times.
• Biggest difficulty was maintaining proper abstraction and sticking to the refactor rules of thumb — overwhelming at first but manageable as the work progressed.

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Next Steps

• Pause the refactor sprint for today.
• Resume tomorrow with Block 2 prep: Dungeon Room Flow and Expanded Enemy AI.
• Plan long-term Buff/Debuff system centralization in a future dedicated refactor sprint.

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Reflection

Today marked a huge step forward. Even though the refactor felt overwhelming at times, I’m extremely satisfied with the progress I made. The biggest hurdle was just trusting myself not to break everything as I carefully rebuilt the structure — especially when deleting large portions of the old code to fully commit to the cleaner architecture.

One big “click” moment was finally seeing the usefulness of the lambda functions I’m using in the Execute() function of my Skill class. They make a lot more sense now compared to when I first saw them. I also realized how useful Godot’s built-in IsQueuedForDeletion() function is for preventing async timing bugs — something I had never thought much about before.

While I feel much more confident compared to when I started this project, I also recognize how much more there still is to learn. That said, my code is much cleaner now, and seeing this growth one building block at a time gives me the confidence that I’ll reach the top of the tower that is Godot and C# eventually. Async safety still feels a bit shaky, but I have the basic concept down now — I just need more real-world practice to fully lock it in.

This refactor has set up a much stronger core for my game, and I’m happy I made the decision to do it before adding more systems. The foundation feels solid and ready for future expansion.