a fun first attempt
I'm in not monetizing or looking to build a community for this project. Just stumbled across it, felt an old love and wanted to dear diary.
it's been about 2 weeks since I've last touched my first project. It's rough + nowhere near ready, a culmination of 'would this work?', but I think it can shared for insight. The game never found its desired shape.
Context: This started in 'Google AI Studio' with no real development background. I opted the route of 'make a dark classic RPG' to simplify a lot of pain points (2D/3D, models, movement nuance, state management) and wasn't expecting much. It was really fun and I learned a ton in 2-3 months.
Eventually the magic trick prompters don't work as well. I know that AI Studio specifically rewrote entire files on each pass and got messy fast when different game elements touched each other. Eventually you start reading the difference like what the fuckity shit is this thing doing.
I migrated the files to Codex 5.2 (at the time), with Codex 5.3 being the main workhorse. The project unraveled into 'How to make combat' with a few dozen ideas thrown at the wall.
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Combat System/Controls:
1.) Pick Duelist Foil+ Scripted Hand
2.) Put your fingers on Q+E and R.
3.) Press Q to parry left signals, press E to parry right signals and press R to basic attack or hold to heavy charge. Press space to fuck all and dodge it.
Alternate controls exist for internal testing:
1.) can mouse-click the directional side of the button or
2.) hold mouse and flick incoming attack signals. (this is cool, wanted this for mobile)
3.) mouse-click to attack. whichever mix works best.
My philosophy with games is that they should be straight forward, but with just enough gesture to feel engaged. Too little and boring, too much and overwhelming without a supporting spine.
This was much it from day 1 and then the mountain of ideas, skill trees, equipment, affixes to compliment it. Things like "Can I make cool shit happen 'after' a parry?"
List of unfinished internal features:
Class + Weapon combinations: (exists but Scripted Hand + Duelist Foil got all my attention). Each class has a passive skill tree that modifies player actions. Player actions are broadly the same, but slightly differ between weapons.
Classes:
Scripted Hand - Parry Specialist
Oathbreaker - Heavy attack specialist
Oathwarden - Block specialist
Hollowstep - Dodge specialist
Plaguewright - Status ailment specialist
Weapon Actions:
Each weapon has access to some or all mitigative actions 'Block', 'Parry', 'Dodge' with different generosity. Some can chain, where the button/press mutates into a follow-up. Some have special features, like Rapier can use its 'Riposte' activation as its own parry.
'Complete'
Longsword: Dodge -> Counter, Parry -> Riposte, Heavy Chain, Pommel
Dagger: Innate chance to hit twice, Dodge -> Counter, Parry
Rapier: Parry -> Riposte-to-Parry -> Staccato
Gauntlets: Flurry, Parry, Counter
All else are incomplete but have basic bones.
Combat:
This project started out as a turn-based RPG and evolved into a weird wheel minigame. There's no tutorial either, sorry.
Data shaped + Deterministic enemy actions. Each enemy has a pool of actions they select - most are weighted probability based on recent action outcomes. This is meant to feel more 'behind the scenes' and to deliver a dynamic fighting stage without being in your face about it.
Dungeons/Movements v0 - Backburner attempt to add grid-based movement to exploration and support an 'extraction' style gameplay spine that was never realized. Currently I think you still get locked out of town and have virtually no return route. You drop all items in bag on death. If you get asked if you want to enter the expanse, say no lol.
Mutating local/global progression - I like this one. Basically if you stay in the same zone for long enough, the backdrop/environment shifts - enemy pools change/become more dangerous. four stages? I think. Where the final stage encases the whole game as a 'Global Nightmare', each zone becomes hostile and enemies are nightmares. Switching zone or dying escapes this mechanic and resets it - except the nightmare stage which lowkey just fucks with you until you die.
Boss fiddling: CTRL+SHIFT+~ key will open a debug menu. Had fun designing a lot of 1v1 encounters. Usually when thinking of a new enemy feature I would build a purposely unfair boss to create the ceiling for the mechanic. Lots of broken shit here.
Affix/Gear logic: CTRL+SHIFT+~ key will open a debug menu and let you spawn in a bunch of enchanted items with stat modifiers. Getting these 'in the game' and not terribly buggy was surprisingly simple.
'Modify' system: You can find gear with a 'Star' symbol next to an affix. This basically means you can feed weak farmed gear into a stronger piece to inherit a fraction of that affix - provided they both have the star symbol.
Scaffolding for world nodes/skills system. There but nothing inside.
Basic 'threads' (quests that generate from in-game actions) and 'bounties' (traditional npc kill quest) system.
'Neutral' NPCs: Things that have agendas, you can talk to, trade with. There's one called a Tooth Collector. I created her as a merchant to facilitate 'human teeth' being a drop.
Visual/Audio Effects: February 2026 and current day remains broadly the same. Models/animations/sprites are a fucking ass. Instead of leaning into animation/art debt, inconsistencies, general ai jank -> I took the one consistent factor, GPT 1.5 imagen, created a meta prompt to output 'same enough' styles and built visual effects around the portraits as the hero; rather than attempting to scale a bridge that's yet to be built.
Cool things that were worth learning here:
1.) Impact, weight and visual manipulation contributes massively to "feel".
2.) "feel" is king.
3.) play games that feel fucking good and then really pay attention to why it feels good during the moments where it feels good.
4.) visual feedback is primarily a tool to help people understand things
5.) Generative AI assets take a lot of work to make "feel" good.
Really simple things to make things feel better:
1.) Micro-freeze on hits. Just a tiny bit. Bigger freezes on hits that leave you half dead. Just enough to let the brain feel that shit so good ugh.
2.) Make the enemy blink when you smack it. This is a primitive 'something happened' cadence.
2a.) light/Illumination, subtle enough around the point of impact. Cheap/free.
3.) physics/scale. If you hit something, it shrinks. If something hits you it expands.
4.) Details like light wisps, dust motes that trigger/mutate on action without taking center stage.
5.) Less is more. if you can communicate things visually with 'less' - it's often better than 'more'.
On the sound side of things. I just used free libraries for SFX and Suno for BGM. Suno is great and is the only service I'll ever use within the 'pay for credits' bullshit monetization platform.
Anyways I'm running out of gas here's a tl;dr:
stack: Vite + TS React + Pixi JS
agents: Codex 5.3 (mvp but sucked at UI, also RIP king) + Claude Opus 4.6 (fired and rehired) + Gemini (fired/uninstalled after bullying it)
software: VS Code + Claude Code
assets: ChatGPT Imagen 1.5, Suno, itch.io samples, sekiro parry sfx, mage.space
currently working on a new project, but hope this information helps even a small few!