Skirmish

Skirmish is a prototype I was working on while I was first waiting to be accepted into a business startup program, and I continued as I developed my business plan. I wanted to implement a card game using standard playing cards and to practice using Godot. I started with War and got it modeled, but the lack of choice frustrated me - it wasn’t fun at all.

After some research, I learned about the Casino War variation. I didn’t want to have a betting mechanic, but I was inspired by the idea of influencing the outcome by applying resources. There’s no psychological modeling or bluffing here; if you add more resources, the opponent has to match. If you run out of resources or cards, you lose. This works, but it’s still not a meaningful choice, and I feel player agency is very important. It still felt like it was lacking something.

The state you see here was not the final state; I had taken it a bit further and started adding a mechanic that I’ve since removed from the prototype and used as a key mechanic for an original game, solving the problems I perceived. I’ve been working on the new project since, but I paused to release Skirmish as a historical snapshot.

Features:

• Menu, Credits, Game, with music for each
• Abstracted Buttons with hover states, sound, mouse & keyboard navigation
• Full deck of cards - front and back - with animated movement
• State management (code organization)
• Strict typing (best practices)
• GUT unit testing (code quality)
• gdlint and gdformat configuration (best practices)
• Git project (best practices)

This was a solid learning experience, and it definitely informed how I’m approaching my next project. Thanks for your interest!