Keywords: combat simulation, simulation game, nice ui, implement ui, godot, mech, mechs, pilots, locked, player, development, control, design. Powered by TextRank.
This is a game that I like to work on my spare time. It's a shot at making a mix of a football manager simulation game with Mechs and their pilots. The player doesn't have control over the individual actions of the mechs and pilots but makes broader tactical decisions and hopes the pilots listen.
I have made some progress on the design of the game. I think I have a clearer picture of what I want the game to feel like: A management game where you “influence” the characters in the game but do not control them directly in a BattleTech type of universe setting. I’ve been jotting down notes in multiple places coming together in a distilled design document. There are still a lot of details to be fleshed out with regards to the specific mechanics and the dependencies between all the knobs the player can adjust but the general framework is there. On the development side I wanted to focus on the tech stack I would use for this and the combat simulation. I want to aim for a cross platform app, so the Apple stack is out of question. I evaluated using a web based platform due to the heavy database management nature of the game and tried Svelte/Vue type frameworks. The nice thing with these is the very rich component system available for free and easy integration. The worst thing is that the 3D combat simulation is not going to be easy to implement and overall these frameworks seem to be very verbose. I had Gemini vibe code a simple prototype with an HTML5 canvas node for the battle simulation and soon realized it was a terrible way to watch combat. The code for the bot logic seemed overly verbose and things like path finding would require manual implementation. I soon decided to not use this approach.
Next, I decided to give Godot a try - something I last used about 10 years ago. I remembered that Godot had a nice UI component library because someone had reimplemented Aurora4X in Godot and their UI looked sharp. Godot is a game engine so most of the stuff I would need for the combat simulation would be readily available. The combat sim prototype looks nice enough and the A* Path finding etc comes out of the box and Gemini is very helpful in guiding me through how to implement things. My biggest concern with Godot right now is how to implement UI components since some of the more complex components are missing. I think there is a market place for components but I’d rather not spend any money on them. Here is a screen shot from the latest combat sim experiments
Some indication of how combat engagement with lasers might look like. Right now the Mechs are pretty static when they engage in combat and just mindlessly shoot out until one explodes.
Here is a video from this week's demo:
Early tests of how the combat simulation navigation would work with Mech tracking eachother. The Mechs have 3 states: wander, locked and engaged indicated by the color of the ring. Wandering Mech pick random coordinates and move their. If they spot another Mech within 3 squares they will switch to locked status and persue the mech. If they get within 1 square they will switch to engaged mode and stop.
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Unknown publish date. ~ 2026-01-28
Generated on 4 Apr 2026 at 5:00 AM
Mobile optimized version. Desktop version.