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Throwing Pixels #9 — The 2024 Wrap.

Hey there, fellow indie game developers, coders, and fans of digital worlds! Welcome back to Throwing Pixels; it’s been a few cycles!

“There must be some kind of way outta here,
Said the joker to the thief.” —All Along The Watchtower, Jimi Hendrix

The Journey So Far
As 2024 wraps up, I’m taking a moment to look back on the progress I’ve made with Grimoires, my turn-based wizard survival sandbox game. This has been a year of prototyping, catching up on modern C++, refactoring, and discovery—a year spent shaping this strange and magical world into something I hope you’ll want to lose yourself in.

I started with a rough sketch of Grimoires as “Vancian magic meets roguelike survival.” The spell system came first: spells are scarce and precious resources, earned and ventured for. From there, I started exploring what that kind of wizard’s world might look like—one filled with rival mages, hostile templars, and the quiet tension of survival. This game isn’t just about combat spells, though they’ve been fun to design. It’s also about non-combat magic: spells that manipulate the world, reveal secrets, or help you avoid a fight entirely. I’ve nerded out tinkering with this idea.

The Code and the Shape of the Game
From a development perspective, this year has been all about building the game's bones. I’ve leaned heavily on C++ and SDL2 to build the game from the ground up. Here are some highlights of what’s been prototyped so far:

• The Turn-based Animation System: Spritesheets, frame timing, and event hooks to trigger game state changes when an animation completes. I've learned action games use animations very differently than a turned based game might.

• The Component System: Grimoires uses a composition-based design for game objects, with components like movement, animation, and collision detection layered together to keep things flexible. I've started playing with spatial-grids for controlling movement and more discoveries!

• Turn-Based Core: Turns process game logic first, queue up animations, and display everything to the player afterward. This lets the game feel snappy and deterministic while keeping the backend clean.

• The World State: I built a central structure for managing game data—actors, sprites, backgrounds, and everything a level needs. This will feed into bigger systems for managing exploration and survival.

One of the biggest lessons this year has been learning to balance exploration with focus. There were lots of rabbit holes and tangents to run down. Building Grimoires is like unearthing an artifact: I have a sense of its shape, but I uncover it piece by piece. The combat loop, for example, is coming together nicely, but I’m still finding the fun in non-combat mechanics. These are the questions that will shape next year’s sprint.

Challenges and Wins
Of course, game development doesn’t happen without some bumps in the road. Debugging the movement system and ironing out delta-time errors were small nightmares. There were days when the sprite wouldn’t stop moving, wouldn’t start moving, or teleported off the screen entirely. But those are the kinds of wins that keep me going—the ones that teach me something new.

Another highlight was the indie game dev communities across the social media space: nothing but support, camaraderie, and experience sharing. Talking about Grimoires—even in its roughest form—has been energizing, whether explaining Vancian magic to uninitiated indie developers or listening to various approaches to similar problems. Oh, and all the available art assets by indie game artists!! Many free to PWYW, which, for me, more engineer than artist, was incredibly useful!

Looking Ahead to 2025
Next year is all about turning prototypes into gameplay. I’ll focus on bringing the whole game together in a vertical slice of play…A.K.A The Demo.There’s also the question of content. I’ve been prototyping mechanics, but at some point, Grimoires will need the world, characters, and spells to make it sing and I’ve been eyeing this Tarot deck here in my office. That’s the next frontier for 2025.

One Last Thing... Building this game has been a year-long conversation with code, magic, and ideas. If you’ve been following along, thank you if you’re new here—welcome! There’s a long road ahead, and I can’t wait to share the journey with you.

"Waterfall, nothing can harm me at all, My worries seem so very small with my waterfall" —May This Be Love, Jimi Hendrix.

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