Unnamed Platformer - Devlog 3

My game is kind of coming together! It’ll still be many weeks, but I did something!

What I did: finished my tile map parser (I decided to use a unique pointer to parse through each tile type and draw the according one, after a bit of thought). I also started working on collision detection. I created a basic checkCollisions function and added getGlobalBounds to every tile class. Before I did that though I had to do some research on Axis-Aligned Bounding Box collision, and how to implement it in SFML. I’m still far from done, but that’s tomorrow’s problem.

Challenges: implementing the map drawing functions (couldn’t figure out how to get the draw functions in the classes to match up with the main class), and after that I was having a lot of trouble with the pointer logic I had implemented (had to use std::move, also there were errors in my file importing structure); then after I got that to work, and implemented the parser into main.cpp, it ended up causing my entire program to crash when I ran build 😭Ended up asking Claude for help for how to fix it; it turned out to be how I had formatted my levels and my level-parsing loop for assigning tile types to tilemap characters. Then lava, water, and zero-g block weren’t drawing properly either. After spending like an hour trying to decode why, I realized sf::Color’s transparency had to be an 8-bit integer rather than a decimal between 0 and 1. Also my doublespike was not drawing properly, so I made it 2 separate convexShape’s rather than 1. Apparently you can’t have mere points holding a single convexShape together, which kind of sucks.

AI used, if any: Like I mentioned, I asked Claude for help on how to fix my level loading feature (it ended up being like 3 minute details) and also used it when debugging my initial collision functions (I ended up replacing <10 lines total by its suggestion).

Plans for next time: I’m going to try to finish collision. That’s my entire goal, since I still don’t know entirely how I’m gonna deal with every collision possible and it might end up taking me a long time depending on the number of mistakes I make/bugs that pop up.

K bye guys

(btw the music in the background is because I was listening to music while I was working on this)