This will be the first of (hopefully) many dev logs about a game I’m going to be prototyping over the next thirty days or so. I wouldn’t say this is my “dream” game, but nor is it small in scope necessarily. It’ll probably be more than a solo developer could do. I’ve accepted that, but still want to give it a shot.

What is the Game?

Terminus was (and may still be) a Creation for Starfield. However, I found working in CreationKit a little frustrating and given I have the next month or so free I wanted to have a bit more freedom from frustrations. I’ve pivoted now to making Terminus a CRPG based on Cities Without Number by Kevin Crawford. CWN has its System Reference Document with a Creative Commons 0 license. My hope here is that I can use this to offload a lot of the thinking I’ll have to do on the mechanics.

Talking scope, I recognize RPGs are probably the worst type of game to start with. My hope here is I can get the core mechanics prototyped this month and then slowly burn away at content. That being said, I really wanted to limit the scope of the content since that’s a major reason CRPGs are hard to make.

A Note About Generative AI

Generative AI has taken the world by storm, you cannot even walk outside without seeing something about it. Here’s how I’m treating it for this project:

  1. Absolutely zero generative AI for art. This includes textures, meshes, music, voices etc.
    • This is for a few reasons. I don’t think the end result is very good, some of the art I can do myself and if I can’t there are tons of folks who are available for commission that do some awesome work. I think art forms thrive when multiple people work on them together and I look forward to embracing that.
    • I also believe asset stores are a boon to solo developers and look forward to utilizing those as well where applicable.
  2. The “boring stuff”, specifically things like .editorconfig files or other IDE configurations
  3. Building tooling. Godot is an open source engine, so its support in text editors isn’t the same across the board. I’ve had success getting a custom VSCodium plugin to auto-complete node names, resource names, animation names etc. I’ve also been using Claude Code to build a web front end for Lore which is a new VCS by Epic Games, tailored to games and open source.
  4. Learning. This is one aspect of LLMs that I think go a little under utilized. I’ve recently been going through GDQuest’s 3D Course course and absolutely loving it. However to escape from “tutorial hell” I’ve found I need to spread my wings and fly. This is scary though, when you don’t have a mentor.
    • I personally struggle with Discord communities. There’s a lot of them, and sometimes your questions go unanswered for hours. If they do get answered sometimes its not the answer that helps you. These communities are still great and I like engaging in them. However, as a learning tool they’re not for me.
    • My process so far has been to search the Godot docs, then do a Kagi search for my problem like the good old days. If I then can’t find an answer, I will ask Claude and continue asking questions until I understand.
  5. Not writing the code. I actually think this could make a working game. I’m doing this for the fun of it. Writing the code to me is very fun! So I don’t want to outsource it. I also don’t like putting my name on things I don’t understand. LLMs generate far more code than I could keep up with.

I’m not under the illusion that I’ll finish this, or even get to the point of production but I figured it could be a fun way to get my feet wet. I’d rather not finish something that I’m interested in working on, than finish something I’m not quite interested in!