Hey everyone, it’s FromQCWithGameDev! In this devlog, I want to talk about what I think is the most important part of starting any new project — whether it’s game development or anything else — and that’s planning.

🧭 Why Planning Matters

I’ve learned that I perform way better when I have clear, concrete objectives to work toward. Having a to-do list I can check off each day helps me stay focused and motivated.

In game development, planning means defining your objectives and your end state — knowing exactly what you’re trying to make, how it should play, and what “done” looks like.

For this project, I wanted to be super clear about all of that before jumping into code.

⚙️ Choosing My Tools and Inspiration

Since I’m already comfortable with Unity, I decided to stick with it. One less thing to worry about.

For the concept, I drew inspiration from one of my favorite board games, Karak. It’s a tile-based dungeon-crawling board game that already feels like a video game at its core.

My goal was simple:

• Recreate the feel and mechanics of Karak

• Focus on local couch co-op gameplay

• Maybe add online multiplayer someday down the road

Recreating a board game has one big advantage — the rules already exist! That meant I could focus on implementation instead of game design.

🧩 Prototyping with Figma

Before touching Unity, I jumped into Figma to storyboard and visualize the game flow. It’s a great way to answer two big questions early on:

1. What happens in the game?

2. What do I want it to look like?

Because I was targeting desktop (Mac/Windows), I knew I’d be designing for a horizontal layout, not mobile. That made things simpler.

I started gathering UI inspiration online — menus, buttons, and layouts I liked — then began creating my own versions. I built a main menu first just to warm up and get a feel for Unity’s UI tools.

🔄 Mapping Out Core Gameplay

In Karak, each player takes turns and gets four actions per turn. That gave me my first UI requirement:

• Clearly show whose turn it is and how many actions remain.

Players move between tiles, exploring as they go. Each new tile reveals something — maybe a room, maybe an enemy, maybe treasure.

That meant I needed a:

• Tile placement system (players choose how to place new tiles)

• Tile content generator (decides what’s inside each new tile)

• Special ability UI for characters who can pick between two tile options

⚔️ Building the Battle System

When a player discovers an enemy, they have to fight it. Battles are resolved by rolling dice, with damage boosted by weapons in your inventory.

So I made a battle UI:

• A button to roll dice

• A results screen explaining the outcome (super helpful for debugging and clarity)

Then I added special abilities — like re-rolling dice, chaining turns, or skipping fights — which required extra buttons and logic in the combat UI.

Once that was in place, I made separate screens for winning and losing battles.

💎 Loot, Inventory, and Curses

After a fight, enemies drop loot. Players have limited inventory:

• 2 weapons

• 3 spells

• 1 key

If they find a new weapon, they can choose which old one to replace.

Some enemies even let players curse another player when defeated — so I built a small UI for that too.

The final goal of the game is to defeat the Red Dragon, so I added an end-game screen that triggers when that happens.

🧙‍♂️ Finishing Up the Core Flow

With all that, I circled back to smaller gameplay details:

• UI for opening treasures, picking up spells or weapons

• Target selection for spell casting

• Handling cases like finding treasure without a key

By this point, I had a full map of what my game’s systems and UI needed to look like — from menus to movement to combat.

Next up? Designing class diagrams and state machines to bring all those pieces to life in code.

🏁 Takeaway

Planning might not be the most glamorous part of game dev, but it’s absolutely essential. Having a clear idea of what I wanted to make — and how each piece fit together — made every next step more manageable.

Even though my UI was rough and simple, this process gave me direction and confidence to start building for real.