Help getting started on forum-like game project

Help Programming
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Godot Version

4.7

Question

Hi, all! I’m starting development on a kind of unusual game project which resembles browsing a web forum from the 00s. The interaction will broadly resemble Her Story in that the player will be using a search function to search the forum in an attempt to figure out some users’ passwords. The vast majority of work on the project is going to consist of writing many posts and threads, with relatively simple coding (I hope?) that is primarily just a series of menus resembling a webpage.

I’ve played around a little with Godot in years prior, following some tutorials to make simple 2D games and prototype ideas, and I used to code in C++ and Java a little decades ago, in high school, but I’m beyond rusty.

I’ve found a wealth of tutorials, especially video tutorials, but most of them cover more common genres and game concepts, like RPGs or platformers. Now that I’m through the GDQuest tutorial mentioned in the documentation, I’m wondering if there are any resources that could help me with getting this specific project started. I could just go through those more traditional tutorials and identify the bits I need, but if there are resources more directly relevant to my game concept, I feel like it’d save me some time.

I thought I might look through video tutorials for building RPG inventories, which would have some broadly applicable strategies, but most of the inventory tutorials I can find resemble Stardew Valley or Minecraft click-and-drag grids, which aren’t exactly what I’m looking for.

(I tried searching this forum for similar topics to make sure this post wasn’t redundant, but unfortunately, searching a forum for the keyword “forum” tends to generate more noise than signal)

Advice on getting started, resources to use, etc. would be hugely appreciated! Thanks for taking the time to read & reply!

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I don’t think this needs super specific tutorials or guides at all.

You need to create a small database of forum entries, either save them as a JSON file, or if you want to have a LOT of them, then I suggest looking into SQLite.

For the actual display / frontend, Godot’s UI / Control elements are plenty powerful for this task.

The rest is just learning how to use a database and query it for information.

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Interesting! Thanks for the reply!

My preference would be to do the writing inside of Godot using Resources. I guess it might be slightly inefficient, but is there a major hurdle I’m not anticipating that will come of making my posts Resources within Godot? I do plan to write as many as thousands of these over time.

Also, can you recommend any resources that tutorialize and teach Godot’s UI / Control elements specifically? I found a handful of very useful videos and can also narrow my search through the documentation, but all resources would be welcome!