Cartastrofe

Un GdR di carta — a paper-thin Italian RPG.

A complete, roughly one-hour turn-based adventure built in Godot 4.6 in the paper-craft RPG tradition: timed action commands, swappable partners, and a flat cut-out world. The land of Buonappetito has had its Five Sacred Flavours stolen by a vain aristocrat, and a young pizzaiolo named Gino sets out — rolling pin in hand, Nonna at his side — to win them back.

Originality. This is an original work and an homage to a genre — the mechanics and the paper-cut-out look — not to any specific game. Every character, name, location, item, line of dialogue, and piece of art is original to this project. There are no third-party characters, assets, music, or story. All artwork is hand-authored SVG. Real ingredient names (salt, oil, basil, tomato, parmesan) are, of course, just ingredients.

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Running it

Requires Godot 4.6+ (no extra dependencies, no third-party assets).

# from the project root
godot --path .                      # opens the editor
godot --path . res://src/Main.tscn  # runs the game directly

The default window is 1280×720 (canvas_items stretch, keep aspect), so it scales cleanly to any size.

Controls

Action	Keys
Move	WASD or arrow keys
Interact / confirm / advance text	E, Enter, or Space
Cancel / back	Esc or Q

In battle, the same interact key drives every action command — tap it in the green sweet-spot for Perfetto! damage, hammer it during a mash window, and tap it just before an enemy hits to Parata! (guard).

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The arc

Six segments, each a stereotype-flavoured area with a few fights and a boss, pacing to roughly an hour. Between chapters you return to the hub village of Borgo Saporito, which visibly regains its colour as each flavour comes home.

#	Area	Boss	Reward
0	Borgo Saporito (hub/tutorial)	Piccioni	Nonna Assunta joins
1	Il Mercato	Donna Vespa	🧂 Sale + Pippo joins
2	Le Colline	Il Cinghiale d'Oro	🫒 Olio
3	Il Chiostro	Fra' Tortellino	🌿 Basilico + Tonia joins
4	La Fattoria	'O Capitano	🍅 Pomodoro
5	Castello del Conte	Il Conte Parmigiano	🧀 Parmigiano → finale

The tone is affectionate, Asterix-style cultural comedy: everyone is ridiculous, everyone is lovable, and lunch is sacred. See docs/DESIGN.md for the full design document — premise, cast, systems, and architecture.

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How it's built

Data-driven so the engine is written once and the ~1 hour of content is authored as plain data tables. Scenes are constructed procedurally in code (Main.tscn is the only hand-authored scene); every screen is a script that builds its own node tree in _ready() and reads/writes the single Game autoload.

src/
  Main.gd / Main.tscn        boot → Game → Title
  autoload/Game.gd           run state: party, HP, Gusto, coins, inventory,
                             flavours, flags, level, screen flow, input map
  data/                      pure static data + math (headless-testable)
    Combat.gd                damage / guard / level-up math — no nodes
    Database.gd              actors, moves, items, flavours
    Content.gd               item/actor lookups
    Story.gd                 the six chapters: areas, NPCs, enemies, bosses
  actors/PaperActor.gd       the paper cut-out visual (SVG sprite + shadow + wobble)
  overworld/                 Overworld, Hud, DialogueBox
  battle/                    Battle (state machine), Battler, ActionCommand, BattleMenu
  ui/                        Title, GameOver, Cutscene, Shop, UiKit (shared styling)
assets/art/                  19 hand-authored SVGs (6 heroes/NPCs, 7 enemies, 6 bosses)

Key boundaries: Combat is pure math (knows nothing about nodes, fully unit testable); Story/Database/Content are the single source of truth for content (adding a chapter is a data edit, not an engine edit); PaperActor is the only place that knows how a character is drawn.

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Testing

Three tiers, all runnable headless except the last:

# 1. Logic: 24 assertions on combat math + content integrity
godot --headless --script res://test/test_runner.gd

# 2. Smoke: full-compile + construct every screen with real state & textures
godot --headless res://test/Smoke.tscn

# 3. Visual QA (needs a display): render composed screens to PNGs
godot --path . res://test/Shoot.tscn      # title / game-over / overworld / battle / boss
godot --path . res://test/Gallery.tscn    # every art file in a grid

The smoke test exists because Godot's --import only shallow-parses scripts; loading a scene full-compiles method bodies and loads autoloads, which is what actually catches runtime errors.

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Status

v0.1 — the complete one-hour arc, playable end to end. Engine plus all six segments authored as data, three partners, five flavours, win/lose/finale. Post-1.0 ideas (badges, audio, save slots, more enemy variety) are noted in the design doc's scope ladder.