This is EXACTLY the kinda stuff I love hearing about in devlog type videos. I love systems design the most and you breaking down things such as hierarchy and how different systems are handled/interact is so enjoyable to me for some reason

I really like how you covered the design of the game! It feels well laid out and extensible, and moving to 4 with its better handling of resources editor-wise is the right choice. No feedback on the implementation, but I think this is a great window into the thought process of actually creating a tactics type game

Thank you so much for explaining your node tree the way you did. Soooo helpful.

Exactly what I was looking for and exactly what Godot needs. Beautiful explanations and break downs.

Having just gotten out of the basic godot tutorial and being struck dumb trying to figure out the top-level basic structure to use for my first self developed project, hearing you talk about the way you organised yours and what informed your decisions feels like opening my mind a little

This is perfect! I will be following this closely. I've started on my own tactics game and was wrestling with how to compartmentalize code and your layout makes so much sense.

such a great technical dive! ive been in the process of iterating on my own tactics game in godot, and when i eventually finish it i hope to rethink my entire approach and create a basic framework similarly to what you are doing

Excellent video! Subscribed!

Such an awesome deep dive! Love to hear how you're thinking about scene organization and coding patterns

I'd love to see more about the Action system, it seems really modular and versatile! Excellent videos, love your content.

Great breakdown!!

This is really cool, I like seeing good architecture and design patterns being applied in games and not just in other fields of Software development

Awesome job! I'm currently working on tactics for a unity game as well. It was interesting to see your architecture as an example

I like the depth of your explanation on node organization. Will come back to study this video later.

You are one of the most underrated KZfaqrs I watch. Your explanations are very concise and to the point, I always learn something from these.

Thank you so much for sharing your code architecture

I just realised I'm trying to make a tactics game. This helps tremendously, if only for that realisation. This came at exactly the right time, please more on this of you have it

Great video, I'm just getting started with Godot and trying to create a small Tactics game for practice, so this kind of overview is very helpful!

Great video! Extremely helpful. Looking to create a similar game, and your insight into the game design rather than going into a deep dive into code is a great approach. Thank you!!!

Thank you for sharing your experience with Godot and tactic games dev! There are pretty clear and useful explanations you've provided in video. The only thing was hard for me is to catch some of the examples related to the events and reaction loop without some kind of event sequence diagrams or other supportive visuals. Anyway, now I'm going to watch the rest of your videos :)

I was trying to make a little tactic game for godot about a half a year ago. It is pleasing to see that I had some similarities in architecture, though it was too much for me when I started AI

love this video. showing and explaining actual node structure when designing game is far more valuable then tutorials about features that beginner developer have no idea how to apply

great stuff 👍

I wanted to make a tactics toy project during summer, this will be super helpful!

Game design ~ node hierarchy 🤯 What a great insight, thank you!

Hell yea dude !! Love this

I have a software engineering background and I've been working on a tactics game myself for the past several months. This is my first real game development project so it is taking me quite a long time. I am happy that it seems like the overall structure I have landed on is very similar to yours. So far I have a "working" concept where I have implemented a "Move" action and can select and move units within their movement range along the grid. I have also implemented a basic melee attack action (that currently doesn't do anything because I haven't implemented a health system yet) which seems to work well. I ran into a bit of a snag today when trying to ask myself what to do about actions that target different kinds of units (friendly, self, enemy, or multiple of these). Currently each unit has its own "Faction" property, and can be "player", "friendly", "neutral", "enemy". I tried to use Data Driven Design where possible and I used an EventBus pattern for most of the communication between nodes. Currently most of the core game logic is being handled by my GameBoard class as that is what contains the actual grid. At first this seemed fine because the GameBoard could answer questions like "What is on the grid in this location?" and "highlight the valid cells I can move to with the move action on this particular unit". But as I go along, this class just keeps growing and growing. It is now over 250 lines, which doesn't seem right. Maybe it is? It just feels very icky to me. I am finding that the Eventbus is just passing around the "active_unit" and "selected_action" around everywhere. Also I can answer questions like "Which cells on the grid are occupied by a grid_object (just units for now)" but I am struggling with more detailed questions like "get me all of the cells in range of this action that specifically have "Friendly" units on them". I think I need to do some more decoupling and the "Services" you talk about sounds like it could be the answer. It's at times like this I wish I had a mentor or more experienced developer to keep me on the right path. I would love to see a more detailed overview of the Services pattern and how they communicate with one another.

Great Video as always! I am most interested in the action overrides mechanic. There are a lot of Pull Requests related to Godot 4's AnimationPlayer and AnimationTree but until more features are implemented this seems like a great way to handle more complex time based events.

As someone who is also trying to make a tactics game in Godot 4, I'd love to see more of this. Also, if you wouldn't mind sharing some of the code, that'd be appreciated as well since there's little to no tutorials for this stuff in Godot 4. If not, that's understandable.

This video has made me pretty interested in trying out Godot over my current engine of choice: GameMaker. The ability to segment similarly functioned code seems to be more robust in Godot's node system compared to simple class inheritance and scripts in GameMaker. The parameter specification within the editor also looks easier to use, and I know 2d lighting and 3d development is out of the box with Godot vs. GameMaker where it requires much more complicated implementation

hey this is super cool! i have tried making my own mini tactics engine a few times and it always gets 'messy' like you say without services.

Im not making a tactics game but a turn based rpg, and this still pretty useful information for that since the general systems are the same

I’d love a breakdown of the combat service and how it interacts with everything else

wow so cool thanks for the tips and experiences. I've been trying to make a game inspired in the gameplay of darkest dungeon 1 and I always reach a point in which complexity is a mess, signals flying everywhere. in all honesty it's quite the balancing act to not use too many global objects or event buses nor too few that makes everything coupled together.

Very cool

Fell in love with the sci-fi tiny pixel art one… would be great if one day you could tell us more about how easy/hard it is for you to do all of this? Is it part time? As a hobby? Does it come naturally? Cheers and thanks for this video

I am very happy about the architecture part of your dev log. Specifically about dependency injection and the services @2:21. Would you be interested in making an in-depth tutorials about this topic? I once did a card game where I wanted to have lots of animations and execute code after an animation is complete (each card had effects and such). I had a UI component that handled animations, CardSuit components which represented the cards, a game state object that held the state of the game and a controller to tie everything together. The controller would consume the input events from the UI, modify the game state, request animations to be played through the ui controller and wait for said animations to finish and so on. I think these kinds of architectures are pretty scarse. It would help out indie game devs a lot! Great video, I really enjoyed watching it and I learned a few things!

This was really interesting. Do you have any videos breaking down how to use service nodes?

I would really love a deep-dive into what Godot 4 changes to resources, typing, etc. you make use of

Really love the format of explaining the structure of the nodes! It's great to be able to look at it and compare my own structural preferences and utilization to yours! (I hate dynamic typing too, but my experience with C# Godot has been eh). Question, I saw that you use custom resources pretty extensively for a good bit of the data in your game, and I don't actually make use of them much, but I do think it's a way to allow certain data to be synced across all locations. My question however, would be, how would you deal with things like upgrades? Like let's say your have a unit that individually has been given extra health, or something, how would you only give that specific unit health if you define the units parameters in a custom resource? Great video as always, and one that I will definitely be revisiting, kind of interesting and useful even for non-tactics games honestly!

Awesome. Have you ever thought about putting all this together in a complete tutorial series? Maybe on youtube or Udemy?

This is a great video and really helpful towards understanding a better way to structure a Godot project. It raised a question for me though, if you have services which do all the "messy" stuff, if they are not autoloaded than how are you referencing them? Surely then you have nodes (like a Unit) which has to have a reference to any service it needs to talk to and if you were to decide to move/rename that service you would have to find and update all the references to it. Is there a reason you wouldn't have all (most) services as autoloaders rather than $path/to/the/service?

This is incredible, thank you for making this! I'm trying to make a tactics game and this has given me some great ideas! I know a lot of people would love a tutorial series, but if you wanted to make something smaller in scope, I would love to hear more about how your Navigation Service works with the rest of the game. Does it store a reference to the tilemap that is on the current level? Does it need to know what units, obstacles, etc. are on the tilemap at all times? And how do your other entities, like units, call functionality on the Nav Service like pathfinding? Are you using dependency injection to pass down a reference to children nodes and having a chain of each parent passing to the child? Or is there some other way you can reference the Nav Service without having to pass it down from parent to child in a chain? In my own project, I'm passing a reference to the tilemap to basically everything and this is not scaling well, so very curious to hear how you've done it here!

I wanted to echo what others said about how good this video is. Also kudos on writing a text version. I'd be interested in learning more about how you're handling your service nodes. My impression is that you have an autoload that you register your service nodes with, and everything else accesses the service nodes through the autoload. What are the benefits of that vs making the service nodes themselves autoloads?

it's amazing that you made specific tools for it, i really want to be at that level. do you have any tips?

Really insightful video! I was wondering if you make the services nodes global to make them easier to access, or do all the nodes that require for example the navigation service have a reference to it?

I like those graphics

Bro the second game ❤ my boy made Quazimorph 🎉😂

I'd love to know more about your use of Services. How does a node request data from a service and how does the service get that data? Is this done by a signal or do you have to pass a reference to the service to any object that needs it? Or does the level script do that? Does the node assume that there is always a service in the scene it's placed in? Keep up the super informative videos!

I'm trying to build a board game, there's a lot of overlap here. Thank you.

its something like create a engine for your own game? btw looks interessant!

Great video! Is there any chance we could get a code template or project for this, would be super helpful.

When can we play your game? Looking forward to it!

I'm curious with your navigation do you use the navigation layer on the TileMap, or load it into your own AStar and build out the paths out of the world?

Thank you for the demonstration. Excuse me, but in 11:30 do you use a shader to create the movement zone?

Not an overly important question at all, but since i'm right now trying to understand them: Have you considered hexagonal grids for those games, and if yes what were the main reasons you decided to not go with them ? For context i'm playing around on what at this stage is more a concept than a prototype. A turn based transport business game in space, mostly ui driven but with a grid based map where you can plan your ships routes and watch them fly around each time you hit next turn. And i'm really trying to understand hex grids now because i feel like they'd make the map part of the game feel slightly more modern (the main inspiration for that project is a 1994 game that probably didn't make waves internationally even, and that used what i'd call points of interest on a simple drawn map)

How did you achieve the tile hover highlighting in 3D, i tried to do this effect with 3D GridMaps too, but i don't really know how to access a single Mesh from the GridMap after ray casting from the mouse button and getting the ray cast position? :/

I know nothing about developing games. I am starting from scratch. Don't know about any coding, but can do art (haven't tried pixel art yet, but I know it will be easy). I am on this journey because Square Enix won't make another Final Fantasy Tactics game, and if they won't, I'll do it on my fucking own.

It is hard to find an guide of tactics style to engines.. 😮😮🎉🎉🎉

do you plan on making a tutorial for these kinds of game, I've been looking for one built for godot 4 because the godot 3 tutorial from gdquest has been really confusing and the code isn't explained very well, either that or I'm just stupid

I’m kinda beginner here in Godot. But is there a tutorial where this is done and sort of explained line by line. I’ve been looking to make an Advanced Wars clone in the future but I barely see any tutorials in the genre. thanks.

do you have a discord? I am working on a similar concept with hex grid.

is the art for the scifi game made by you or is it an asset pack?

Will you be selling a Simple demo like this on the new Godot asset store.. If they ever get one?

The noise suppression in your mic really needs fixing. It's small but it's noticeable. Game looks really good tho :)

This is good but a lot of it glosses over these pretty meaty concepts. But you can only do so much on a video. But very well organized.good to study over

What's the one at 0:00

Have you considered lve-streaming your sessions? Wouldn't need to have commentary, it'd just be so great to be a fly-on-the-wall

I need someone to officially release an engine like this. I've wanted to make these kinds of games since playing FFTA as a kid.

Great video, wish you would go more indepth with the code. Would really like to see the nuts and bolts of what's going on

next video please about idle game and mechanisms please

The development community has been sucked into trending words so much they lost sight of what an Engine is. Is it a roguelike because characters can die and open world because you can choose where to walk too? LOLOL

I feel like system is a more idiomatic term for games, service makes me think of microservices...

Downvote was for starting a statement with 'so'. As 'so' is meant as a joiner between a previous comment and the present one.