Welcome to the beginning of something big! We’re thrilled to have you here as we embark on building Guardfall, a project driven by passion, creativity, and a desire to share every step of this adventure with you. Whether you’re a curious newcomer or a seasoned developer, this diary is your front-row seat to our journey: the ideas, the breakthroughs, and even the challenges along the way.
Our current website (yes, this barebones one) will serve as our Development Diary, where I’ll be posting updates, progress reports, and thoughts as we build Guardfall.
The official start date of our boilerplate engine called “Ironhold” (yes, it has a name now!) was set for Monday, 22nd of September, 2025, in fact, I started working on the engine Sunday, 20th of September and half of our planned goals below are already completed, so this will be an expansion over our original Discord post.
What is the Ironhold Engine?
That’s a fantastic question! Guardfall and all of our future projects will be built on an engine we call Ironhold.
Ironhold will receive regular maintenance, including bug fixes for games in production, unlike some developers who build their boilerplate and do not update it again, so when their next game releases, bugs from previous games still exist. With that said, whilst we’re using Godot as our base engine, Godot is modular and flexible. That means we can extend it to meet our specific long-term needs, such as:
- Mob/NPC handling
- Player management
- Game Object handling
- Core systems for performance and stability
Think of Ironhold as our foundation layer. Instead of rebuilding the same systems in every project, we’ll have a solid (not to mention regularly maintained) framework ready to go, whether it be 3D or 2D!
How We Structure Development
We break development cycles down into phases, each phase consisting of milestones.
- Phases
- Larger goals
- Milestones
- Specific trackable targets
This ensures our systems are not only modular but also reusable and future-proof, not just quick fixes or messy code.
Phase 1 Goals
Milestone 1
- Create the base project
- Set up the project structure (so no future devs get lost!)
- Implement a GameManager (the player’s states, loading, menus, paused)
- Implement a SceneManager (handles map changes, main menu transitions, and scene unloading for performance)
Milestone 2
- Implement a standalone Entity system
- Drives NPCs and Players
- Centralizes management instead of each node handling it’s self
It might sound like a long or short process depending on your background, the main priority and focus is doing it properly.
Note: we’re at the end of Milestone 2 already, in just THREE days; however, some plans have changed such as Objects (Items, interactable Game Objects will be handled by a separate system instead of by Entities)
Looking ahead, the engine has been designed with scalability in mind, including the potential to support multiplayer features in future project, This ensures as we build new games, the core systems are ready for cooperative gameplay if we choose to implement it.
Going forwards, Phase and Milestone updates will be shared once the Phase is complete!
Thanks for joining us at the very start of Guardfall’s journey!