Yes, I am one of the many chasing the childhood’s dream. I would like to recreate Might and Magic VII. I am not in any way affiliated with the current owners of the game. All I want to do, is to create the engine from scratch. Ideally, given an installation of the game, it would be good to allow for reusing the assets from that game, to start the remake with the old look.

To achieve this, my plan is, divided into thematic parts that should align with the categories on the blog.

Godot:

• Get familiar with Godot, a free and powerful game engine, with its own Python-like scripting language GDScript, and C++ support.
• Learn how to reuse code in Godot between the projects. As simple as it sounds for any programming language, Godot has limited support for “libraries”. Recommended way seems to be copying of files (https://github.com/godotengine/godot-proposals/issues/577) but that can easily go out of sync.
• Learn how to use C++ code in Godot. Ideally, a simple example provided as a repo. Minimalistic.
• Learn how to properly test Godot code. It’s gamedev, and so testing seems to be “organoleptic”. For code, this must not be the case.

Gamedev:

• Divide the original game into parts that can be programmed separately:
  • Menu and the party creation.
  • Beastiary for work on NPCs.
  • Emerald Isle as a working area.
  • User Interface.
• Keep every part separate. Identify and extract common code as libraries/utilities.
• Allow for modding. One way to achieve this would be to add Lua support to the game, and offload logic to it, so it can be overwritten.

For motivation, I would like to write this blog. I might need to create a buffer of blogs for when I am away. But this should help me stay focused. Finally!

Why Might and Magic?

I first played the game around the year 2000, being a kid in Eastern Europe. I spent way too many hours grinding it, instead of progressing the story. The setting at the first glance is close to general high fantasy, like most notably Lord of the Rings, but the Might and Magic franchise is a universe of its own. I probably played way more the strategic game, still very popular (just take a look at its Twitch page: https://www.twitch.tv/directory/category/heroes-of-might-and-magic-iii-the-restoration-of-erathia), namely Heroes of Might and Magic III. It’s awesome to play both the RPG and the strategy game in the same lands, and interact with the characters.