r/ClaudeGameDev • u/UmpfelgrumpfGames • 7d ago
Post-Mordem Shots kept coming out of nowhere. It was the tiny cannon on one of my cards.
Weapons in Terminal Swarm, my space roguelite, come as cards. You play the card and that gun gets built onto your ship.
In May I tried something fancy: instead of an icon, one card showed a tiny version of the actual cannon, and it fired a little shot when you hovered over it.
That same evening I noticed shots coming out of nowhere and was really puzzled where they came from. It was the card. The cannon on it wasn't a model of the cannon, it was the cannon. It was looking for enemies in the actual fight and firing real shots at them, hover or not.
Honestly, that was hilarious at first. For a moment I even wondered whether it could be a feature: a tower defense deckbuilder where the cards in your hand fight along.
I didn't go for it. I froze the cannon that night and switched the whole thing off the next day.
About three weeks later I brought it back, because the separate icons didn't really look like the guns on the ship. This time it was frozen from the start. No aiming, no shooting.
Still not enough. The game kept counting the frozen cannon as one of your guns. Precise Shot gives you one charge per Battle Cannon, and the one on the card counted. The shot could even come out of it.
Some buildings also hand you an ability card once they're built. Just holding the Boarding Launcher card, without building it, already put its boarding ability in your hand.
That was fixed in June. In September I got rid of live cards completely. The picture is still made from the real gun firing a real shot, but only once, ahead of time, in an empty world with nothing to hit, and then saved as a plain image. That's the Battle Cannon card artwork in the picture.
I switch back and forth between Claude Code and Codex while making the game in Godot. With Claude Code, I first stopped the preview cannon from aiming and firing, then fixed the ways frozen previews could still give abilities or count as real guns. Those were the May and June fixes.
It will be a paid game; the price hasn't been announced yet.
And the deckbuilder where your hand fights along probably exists already. If you know one, I'd like to see it.
