Patching Up Combat and Building Better Testing Tools

Today focused on two major areas: refining combat UI and strengthening testing infrastructure.

The combat work addressed multiple issues including turn flow problems, UI behavior bugs, and ship logic errors. Notably, only the defender was firing and the End Turn button did nothing. The combat log now displays but remains empty, and the minimize function is broken. Ship details lack cooldown indicators, marked for future attention.

Testing uncovered a critical problem: Claude was reporting test successes despite GUT throwing warnings and memory leaks in-editor. The root cause was autoload behavior differences between headless testing and the editor environment, requiring manual test execution going forward.

To improve the process, two Claude agents were created:

• Godot Developer Agent — context-aware game development support
• Quality Control Reviewer — identifying inconsistencies and code quality issues

Both were initially drafted with ChatGPT, then refined through Claude. The test suite requires cleanup work on failing tests, memory leaks, and verbose logging.

Additionally, a Zig-based test harness was started to simulate full game runs via a TCP server embedded in Godot, enabling batch game execution and real gameplay data collection for insights into balance, exploit detection, and hidden rough edges.