Devtober 2022 Post-mortem

Scare Tactics is based on an idea I had earlier this year about playing as a ghost and scaring away teenagers who want to trespass into your house as a test of courage. Although we only got a prototype available, we accomplished our goal of finishing a prototype and I made progress daily with no zero days this month. I also collaborated with my friend Jurlo, who I worked with on our first game, Stray Cat Crossing.

While the idea originated as only a tower defense game, Jurlo suggested making it a deck-builder for replayability. Although this increased the scope, I think this made the game more enjoyable. However, implementing the card system and connecting it with placing objects or "hauntings" on the tilemap proved to be a challenge. The first implementation was very buggy and not easily extendable, so I spent a good amount of time refactoring. Using state machines and encapsulating behavior into their own nodes/scripts proved to be very helpful and is something I ought to keep in mind earlier in the process.

An example of this is how I originally had cards emit a signal for the grid to place an object, but this didn't work for other card types such as the "Draw 2" card that didn't have any object to place. I then realized that the card behavior should be separated and that the card should define what behavior to run when played, so I made a CardBehavior node that can be attached to any Card scene and has the level reference passed in so that it can handle the card's behavior. This also greatly simplified the grid script.

This was also our first foray into isometric, which we had decided because of the aesthetic and being able to simultaneously see two sides of walls and objects felt nicer. While this did not prove to be much of a technical challenge due to Godot's tilemap system, this did make the art side more difficult.

More time spent on the core systems meant less time for content, so we ended up with only 2 teens types, 5 card types, and 4 objects/hauntings. These were enough to test our systems, but not enough to keep the game interesting. There were also several other features we had to cut out, such as phobias, spirit power interactables, a reputation point shop, and more card/haunting types.

Thank you to the Devtober community for the feedback and advice, and a big thank you to my unnamed friend who play-tested and caught a few game breaking bugs! I had fun and enjoyed seeing the game go from boring blocks to a playable state.

We have decided to gather more feedback before deciding whether to make Scare Tactics into a full release, feel free to leave a review and let us know what you liked or didn't like!