It’s a very simple example of a classic JRPG-style turn-based command battle built with Defold.
This is not a full game, but a lightweight reference for learning and experimenting.
Why I made this project
I thought there wasn’t a sample of a turn-based command battle system available for Defold, so I wanted to create one.
I also wanted to try an experiment: handling both display and input entirely through GUI.
This means you don’t need a camera at all, which keeps things simple and different from many other approaches.
What’s inside
A minimal turn-based system (heroes vs enemies)
Two core scripts:
battle.script → manages state transitions and battle data
battle.gui_script → manages text display and player input
In this sample project, I used Notion as a database management tool. I found that Notion offers a couple of significant advantages over traditional spreadsheets like Excel for managing game data:
Visual Management with Board View: The ability to organize data in a Kanban-style board makes it intuitive to categorize items.
However, I ran into one major challenge. The CSV files exported from Notion are not in a format that can be easily used by Defold. Specifically, they contain links and line breaks that make the data difficult to parse.
To solve this problem, I created a Defold editor script. This script makes it possible to easily convert the CSV files from Notion into a format ready for use in your game.
thanks for sharing.I think defold miss like jrpg sample/template or turn based battle
I current learn to make turnbased jrpg combat system pokemon. and your example maybe very helpful for me. I will study it seriously thanks share again！
one more thinking： I think defold need create more popular or famous or ‘more easy to make game’ like visual game genre game tutorial and sample like jrpg finalfantasy, mother or undertale to get attention popularity all this just to tell story or easy to tell own story
turnbased_simple_battle
Happy Defolding! 
