Game Mechanic Database

This is the Game Mechanic Database, an open-source collection of game mechanics intended to educate and inspire folks who want to make games or learn about them. Each mechanic comes with a description, controls, and a set of parameters that you can use to tweak and tune the mechanic's behavior.

Come find us on Discord!

Contributing

Prereqs

• Godot 4.1.x Stable

Guide

1. Take a look at Bobber Fishing or Pattern Crafting to see how we structure mechanics
2. Fork the repository
3. Use the Mechanic Manager Plugin (upper left) to create a new mechanic skeleton. You'll see that we create a scene for you, drop in the core UI, and create a data script. Properties on that data script are used to generate the configuration tab on mechanic pages - you'll see how it works in Bobber Fishing and Pattern Crafting.
4. Add your mechanic to MechanicDatabase.gd
5. Implement your mechanic
6. Create a thumbnail (screenshot is fine) and reference it in MechanicDatabase.gd
7. Test, polish, playtest, etc (a good time to review with the discord!)
8. Cleanup unused assets, fill out description.txt and attributions.txt
9. Create a pull request

A finished mechanic will have:

• A decent level of polish
• Content in description.txt
  • A description of the mechanic generally
  • How your implementation works
  • If applicable, links to videos and other content about games that have implemented the mechanic
• Appropriately licensed assets (see the Assets section below)
  • Fill out attribution.txt where appropriate
• No unused assets (eg textures, audio, scripts, etc that aren't in use)

Assets

You are welcome to pull in third-party assets but you need to make sure that their license is compatible with the license on this project. Creating your own assets or using CC0 is the easiest way to do so.

The main way we deploy the GMDB is through web export, so please try and re-use assets in the Shared folder where possible to keep the download size of the DB low.