in progress
Tristo Tactics
A turn-based tactics RPG built solo in Godot 4 — you fight the same war twice.
- Year
- 2024—present
- Role
- Solo — design, engineering, writing
- Built with
- Godot 4.6, GDScript, Custom tooling, Python
A tactics RPG whose central structure is repetition: the campaign is fought once under a lie, then again from the other side, with scenes deliberately built to collide across both halves.
The idea
Most tactics RPGs tell a story between battles. This one puts the story in the structure: a set of scenes are authored to occur twice — once in Act 1 believing one version of events, once in Act 2 knowing the truth — so the second encounter reinterprets the first rather than continuing from it.
That constraint drives the engineering. Scenes have to be replayable with different framing, dialogue has to branch on knowledge state rather than on player choice alone, and the level scripting has to express 'when this, then that' without hardcoding either half of the pair.
Engineering
Built on Godot 4.6 with a deliberately modular structure: nine autoload singletons handle cross-cutting concerns (events, terrain, audio, persistence, combo resolution) while battle logic lives behind a state machine rather than in scene scripts.
Levels are authored as plain-text ASCII maps parsed at runtime, so map iteration is a text edit instead of a scene edit. A declarative trigger engine expresses scripted beats as WHEN/THEN rules, which keeps cutscene logic out of the combat code.
Verification runs headless: dedicated self-test scenes exercise the trigger engine, cinematic effects, combat animation, and combo reactions against the real engine binary in CI-style runs, which catches regressions that are invisible from the editor.