Tactical RPG Movement series

As a kid, tactical RPGs fascinated me.

I spent countless hours playing through Fire Emblem, Vandal Hearts, and Nippon Ichi Software’s games, like Phantom Brave and Disgaea.

They felt more strategic than most Japanese RPGs, yet not stressful like Real-Time Strategy games like StarCraft. I think that’s what I enjoyed so much about them.

In this beginner-friendly series, you’ll learn to lay the foundations for a Tactical-RPG from zero.

You’ll code a complete grid-based movement system as seen in titles like Fire Emblem and Advance Wars.

By the end, you’ll be able to:

1. Move a cursor around a grid by pressing the arrow keys or using the mouse.
2. Select a unit when the cursor hovers its cell using the keyboard or the mouse.
3. Move a selected unit to another cell within its movement range.

All that with pathfinding and movement preview.

Some of the techniques you’ll see here apply to about any grid-based game, whether you want to create a rogue-like, an RPG, or even a puzzle game!

This entire series is brought to you from our course Godot 2D Secrets. It’s complete and entirely free and open-source.

As usual on GDQuest, the code’s free and open-source. You can find the complete demo here: 2D Tactical RPG Movement demo.

In the first lesson, we’ll start by looking at how we can handle grid interactions and the code structure we’ll use in this project.

Let’s get started!