How to start a turn-based grid strategy game?

AcetheSuperVillain

I love turned based strategy, or TBS, games, genres like 4X, Strategy RPGs, Rogue-likes (real ones), and so on. I'd love to try making one, even something simple, but I've always felt like the topic is way over my head. Any idea where to start?

I've seen GDQuest's grid tutorials, but these are like Zelda or Final Fantasy games, not exactly what I'm looking for. I've seen Red Blob Games' articles about pathfinding too, but I'm wondering if there are any Godot specific specific tricks that would help. And I'd rather make games in 3D, but there are so few tutorials for that.

persondashman

Well, there's a couple different approaches. I'm working on a TBS multiplayer game right now and how I did it was perhaps a bit too complex in many ways as I had other goals as well. Basically, if I had to approach just a regular turn based strategy game, I'd just restrict movement by making sure the character only moves the pixel width of your tile at a time, or any multiplicity of it. I edited the position manually, but there's probably a better way to do it I'm just not sure what that is. Then I'd put all entities that are going to move into an array or dictionary and cycle through that for turn order.

That gets you basic movement and enemies/a player that move properly, which I'd qualify as a start.

AcetheSuperVillain

So the part that I really don't know how to approach is making a movement range UI. For games like Civilization, Final Fantasy Tactics, Disgaea, etc, your character has a movement range and you are shown a visual display of all your possible moves, and you can click on a square to get there. I could work around that, but I'd rather not go into the project with that sort of compromise.

persondashman

Depends how advanced you want to go into it. I used two tilesets, one with a lower opacity, and used a floodfill algorithm to solve for the range I wanted my players to move. The result looks like this:

That's only the way I handled it though, there are numerous approaches to AI displaying possible movements.