Wario Cave Escape Devlog: Health, Damage, and Dramatic Falls!

The project is actually moving pretty fast and the main game is finally coming together. Wario isn’t just walking around an empty cave anymore, things can actually hurt him now lol. Losing has a pretty funny retro death animation too.

Garlic for Health & Enemy Attacks

The enemies actually attack now instead of just pacing back and forth. I got their hitboxes and attack animations working so they rush Wario on sight.
For health, I made a garlic system since that’s his favorite food. So instead of basic hearts, you have garlic bulbs at the top of the screen. Also added i-frames (invincibility frames) so if you get stuck against a wall you don’t just instantly die. Your sprite flashes and you get a second to run away.

Classic Mario ahh Death Animation

If you lose all your garlic or the timer hits zero, you get a dramatic death sequence like in classic Mario games:

Wario freezes and plays a shocked hurt frame.
The camera locks in place and stops following him.
His collision turns off, he flies up into the air, and then drops straight down off the screen.

Fixing the coins and next steps

I did have a problem with the collectibles. I originally put all the gold coins directly into the TileMapLayer, but that made it super annoying to do individual pickups, animations, and sound effects.
So the plan is to move them out of the TileMap and rewrite them as separate 2D sprites with an Area2D trigger. Once that’s done I’ll make a UI counter to track how many you grabbed.

When To Release?

The first game is lowkey almost ready to ship. Here is what I have left to do:
• Finish moving the coins to separate sprites
• Make the Win and Game Over screens
• Add SFX (jumping, getting hit, collecting coins)
Since I’m getting way better at the engine syntax, I might actually turn this cave escape into just one of many minigames for a bigger Wario series later on.