A dated record of what got made and how. The first entries cover the ten days that took Catapultia from an idea to a closed test on Google Play.
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The Rampart Forge account was set up on Google Play, and the game got its name, Catapultia, and its burning-stone icon. It also gained support for any screen shape with a camera cutout, in-game bug reports, a privacy policy and a store page. After an internal test on 30 October, it passed Google’s review on 31 October in about 20 minutes, and the closed test opened with version 0.9.5.
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The world got new ground and grass, a forest, light, haze and cloud shadows, and the forest is made entirely of trees I made myself. The weapons, the heart, the building phase, birds, butterflies, the interface and the little weapon crews were all animated. Graphics settings, battle stats with an end-of-match report and swapping weapons mid-battle came in too.
Wind now changes during the match. The haystack arrived, along with tile roofs that don’t burn, water barrels that put out fire, and fire and piercing bolts for the ballista. Weapons can now stand to the left or the right of your zone.
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Play over Wi-Fi came first: the game finds the other phone on the network by itself, and you can rejoin after a drop. Online play followed, with its own match server, six-digit room codes, encrypted connections and protection against abuse.
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The trebuchet, the ballista, the fire pot and the stone cluster joined the catapult. Fire burns for several turns and can burn the heart. After balancing, no weapon dominates. Against the others the catapult won 53% of matches, and the trebuchet and the ballista 48% each.
Five music tracks arrived, then four more for battle, along with the main menu, pause, settings and a new interface. The game got its fonts, Kurale and Rubik.
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Castles used to be assembled from ready-made parts; now each player builds a defence from blocks on a grid around a heart with a health bar. You can move the heart instead of shooting, and a match lasts at most 60 rounds. The balance came from hundreds of computer-vs-computer matches.
From a prototype of a destructible castle I picked a 10 cm cube with smooth faces and shaded corners. On a phone, two full castles built from these cubes still ran at 60 frames per second.
The project moved to Godot 4.7 (.NET, C#) in one day and six steps. The logic came over with its tests, and matches were compared with the Unreal version turn by turn. The Android build shrank from 169 to 52 MB, and the phone still held 60 frames per second.
Work started on Unreal Engine 5.8 under the working title Stonehurl. The catapult duel and aiming by hand were there from the first day, along with the match core, gold, the look and the sounds.