Unnamed Platformer - Devlog 8

Bro idk

What I did: I finally wrapped up the character roster by implementing and debugging the last two shapes: the hexagon and the octagon. The biggest milestone was completely overhauling and fixing the wall jump implementation for the octagon (which took me like 1.5 hrs out of which 50 minutes worth of changes were discarded). I ended up shifting all the wall-jump physics directly into the jump event handler, rather than splitting the logic between two different functions (my jump and updatepos functions). This allowed me to make it so I can properly maintain and destroy momentum for wall bounces

On top of physics stuff, I built the level progression system. When you touch the exit tile, the game increases your level index and loads the next stage. It’s finally starting to feel like a real game! Although, not really, since every level after the second is the exact same weird ahh testing level cuz I needed to make sure my system worked.

Challenges: The real nightmare was the octagon’s wall jump. I spent about 50 minutes writing changes because the physics wouldn’t cooperate, only to discard them because I got too confused 🥀I had half of the wall jump math in jump() and the other half in updatepos() and it was making the normal movement code immediately overwrite/neutralize the walljump code the very next frame. Another thing was making it so you couldnt just hold down the w or up key and automatically bounce up forever. I had to add an input debounce check so you have to release+re-tap the key to jump again. Everything else was honestly smooth sailing and any other bugs took maybe <15 mins to solve.

AI used, if any: I didn’t use much AI, since the two big features I added were pretty easy to implement/debug, but I did ask it to help me a bit with wall jump logic since I was pretty fried.

Plans for next time: Now that the physics is working, I’ve decided I want to get rid of it all.

Sliding shapes feel hella unnatural (also the hitboxes are pretty weird), so I’ve decided on making the shapes roll around/have accurate hitboxes using SAT (Separating Axis Theorem) vector math. I asked Gemini how long it would take and it literally told me to avoid it if I can 😭 so we’ll see how many hairs I lose over the course of trying to implement SAT. It’ll probably be all I do from now until around the start of August when I’ll be going on vacation

K bye guys