Jess' Cool Forum

I am still doing it.

Two major movement mechanics have been added to the game, the first of those being pole climbing. You can grab onto poles and scale them, jump off of them, all of that. It's worth noting that you can't attack on poles, making evasion particularly important if there happens to be something else sharing the space with you.

The second mechanic is swimming. Compared to the protagonist of Arnica, the player here is significantly more agile. Not only swimming quicker, but also being capable of performing a short boost if you press the run button underwater. The one downside they face however is a concerning one. You can't breathe underwater, and eventually that air will run out.

As this game trudges along towards the second playtest build, things are becoming far more lively. Multiple enemies take up levels, backgrounds display proudly behind the world, coins spin, springs react, and the world finally begins to breathe. There is still so much to do, but a game has come out of the chaos.

One more post. I spent the last 10 dev hours or so in a fugue state. I just kept going over the swimming code again and again, with 3 major refactors in total. The first version let the player swim in 8 directions, but was super janky. The player's movement was incredibly stilted, and being in the water just didn't feel or look right. With how much time I have spent on the movement in this project, anything less than perfection is not acceptable. I want swimming to be as smooth as the player's land movement.

So I refactored the code, into a sort of pseudo analog style. This allowed the player to move in any direction, and also rotated the player's sprites and hitboxes around much more smoothly. but it began to fall apart when I added the Swim Boost and the Swim Spin, which are both very important moves. It further fell apart when I found that moving backwards would completely break this system. Having such a central movement mechanic be broken just by moving backwards is absolutely not acceptable. So with everything I learned about rotating things in Godot, I went ahead and started a final revision. This version supports true analog movement, in any direction with no issues at all.

With the countless boot ups to test, change, fiddle, revamp, refactor, and break things, I ended up with a swimming mechanic on an entirely different level than most 2D games. My search for perfection has somehow brought along control so smooth it feels as good to be in the water as it does to be out of it, and this is reflected by the player moving just as fast underwater as they do out of it. I am fully confident that I can now make water levels in this game that will be as fun to play as land levels.

Been busy animating everything. Had to refactor a lot of code to change it all to animated sprites. Really the bigger thing was learning how to animate in Clip Studio Paint. It's also worth noting that before this, the only animation I had ever made was a few pixel art sprites. So going from that to animating full figures and such was certainly a jump.