Hey! Welcome to my first devlog… well, ever! Devlogs like these are the main reason I started this blog in the first place, both as a way to chronicle my projects as they grow, but also to talk about them a little more in depth than I can on my portfolio proper. To catch you all back up to speed, the first project I’m gonna talk about here is The Infinite Arena, a combat-system prototype that I decided to turn into a game by force-feeding it roguelike elements… and I don’t even like roguelikes that much. This devlog will cover the things I worked on over this past two-week sprint, so I guess let’s just hop right into it.
UI
It may not sound impressive to say “yeah so I made my main menu this week,” but the last version of the project didn’t have one since I was focusing solely on the combat itself. And while it’s for sure simple, I’m pretty proud at how quickly I whipped it all up and got it working. When working on UI I try to imagine all the possible features I might need, which led me to two features I’m very excited to implement:
- As the game hinges on replayability, adding a Hall of Fame where players can view their most successful runs felt like a no-brainer. It will track the longest lasting runs, while also showing you the three units that got you there, all their builds, and a total sum o their stats just for fun.
- Given all of the moves, equipment, etc. in the game that players would have to familiarize themselves with, adding a Codex where they can view it all made too much sense. Everything starts locked — only showing the name — until the player gives that move or item to one of their units. This way, it incentivizes completionists to at least try everything in the game (or maybe just cycle through them while waiting for their builds to come online).
I used this wonderful asset pack I found. I’ll fill up the blank space soon, I promise.
Resource Creation
Speaking of all those moves and items… well, they actually have to exist, don’t they? Well, using Godot’s Custom Resources, they do! Many of them did in the prior iteration of the project, but as I’m reorganizing many aspects of the game, a lot of them had to be redone in a couple aspects. I had toyed around with using a spreadsheet to organize the data and then export into Godot, but I figured that since I’d have to reformat my current spreadsheets and type in the data again anyway, I’d just finish them in engine. And with a handy plugin that formatted my resources into an in-engine spreadsheet, it didn’t take nearly as long as I thought! Definitely not as bad as sifting through my sprite sheet to find all of the images I needed, though…
It was worth it, though. Look at how cool those swords look.
Save Data Management
Probably the biggest thing this week was learning how to manage the game’s save data. I’ve tinkered around with using JSONs in Godot before for small projects, but with the Hall of Fame, Codex, current run bookmarks, and so much more, I knew I had a lot of data that needed saving. So I wanted to teach myself Godot’s custom resource saving and… it was surprisingly simple. Like, way less daunting than I originally thought. After I understood how to actually save and load from the file (literally two and one line(s) of code respectively), it was pretty much just hooking up all of my references logically and hoping I future-proofed well enough.
Since there isn’t actually any game right now, though, it only works on the audio sliders… which don’t produce any sounds yet… But it works! Gameplay comes next week, I promise.
Well, that’s it for this devlog! I found this to be a super productive sprint, even if it was just getting a lot of the easy stuff out of the way. Like I said, my initial plan for next sprint was to work on gameplay proceedings proper, including selecting units and actually getting into combat. However, since drafting this page I decided to join two whole game jams! So instead I’ll probably be focusing on those, say stay tuned if you want to check those out.
Posted: June 8th, 2026
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