Dev Log 01 – Crop and Claw

Creatures are fun to design, and among them dragons. Really, dragon-centric media could probably be pretty popular, but there’s not a lot. You basically get Spyro for games and then Wings of Fire 15 years later, with smaller stuff in between. While there’s been a lot of work towards a turn based RPG project, the architecture was never refined for the depth and complexity of the given system. Additionally, Dinoleaf needs more “stuff” out there. This had me do some Godot prototyping for a turn based game, built with NES limits in mind for the most part. This project basically became building a steady (enough) JRPG kernel that we could build a single game on, then refine quickly to make a sequel or three over the following few months. Crop and Claw has become that experiment’s patient.

Much of Crop and Claw’s core takes from Famicom-era JRPGs, at least your typical Dragon “Warrior”/Final Fantasy/Mother foundations. As much as I have writing a game or three for classic consoles, I don’t have time to learn the art of correctly writing 6502 assembly. Godot still does the job since we can archive the source code for future-proofing and porting.

The kernel and core started development in mid-December. Since CnC is based on a relatively simple type of game, it’s mostly been a matter of getting base functionality together. That is to say, field; combat; and menus to interact. Getting the first two worked well enough for getting enough material to set up a Steam page about a month after development really started, attempting to start marketing sooner than later. For this, I also may as well start a dev blog proper for the company. Should all go as planned, dev info both in these blogs and also not publicly posted may go into a physical postmortem book release.

I have no idea how consistent or interesting most posts will be, but this blog overall serves as a dumping ground for some more technical information that other developers might find interest in. If you want to support any stuff you see, wishlist or buy the stuff we offer. As year 2024 continues, we’ll probably be releasing a few things here and there.