devlog #8: fixed the whole glitch with the draggable windows, now it works perfectly and the resize buttons are fully functional now!

Added checkpoints to the levels

If you find that the game is too challenging, you can turn on checkpoints in the settings menu. This lets you respawn at the nearest checkpoint after dying, instead of starting the whole level over again. I hope that this option can make my game playable by more people of different skill levels.

Redesigned Old Levels to Work Better With New Player Movement

With player movement out of the way, I can get to making even better levels. This one in particular, which you can see below, is a level I’m quite proud of. I took inspiration from Hollow Knight’s Path of Pain a little bit.
I don’t have much left to do, but I definitely want to add some better sound effects.

Finishing the Movement and Experimenting with Dynamic Lighting

I finally got all the movement mechanics down. I still might refine the black holes a little bit, but first I want to redesign some of the earlier levels.
My teammate suggested dynamic lighting for our game, and while it looks cool, it seems to difficult to set up completely for our Stardance release.

Greatly improved the Level Select screen by making animated level buttons

I used Godot’s Tweens to make the level select buttons rotate and pop when you select them. The effect isn’t perfect yet, but it’s getting there. What do think of the effect?

Fixed a Tricky Level Transition Bug

I was experiencing this frustrating bug where, if you try to run back and forth between levels too fast, you can fall off the map. I expanded the camera boundaries to see what was happening better, and slowed down the game a bit using Godot’s awesome tools. I solved the bug by reordering the level transition code.
On the first slide, you can see the original bug, and on the third slide, you can see the fixed version.

Refined the Gravity Switch Shockwave Even More

It made the shockwave effect go by faster, and be properly centered on the player. This makes the shockwave feel just right when playing the game, and gives the gravity switch the perfect amount of impact.

Improved Game Juice and Improved Visual Effects

Game Juice

I started working on adding the little details to the movement that make the game way more fun to play. I added a few freeze frames when starting a dash, which was inspired by Celeste. I also added a bit of camera shake to give the player even more feedback on their movement.

Visual Effects

This part was really satisfying. I made a shockwave warp effect around the player when they perform a gravity switch, which looks great. Then I made the black holes look better by distorting the background.

Frustrating Bugs

I’ve been having a lot of movement bugs that are tricky and inconsistent to replicate, and I can’t figure them out yet.

Next Steps

I still need to get the AnimationTree to work, but that should really be quite easy. I still have to redesign some levels.

Added more to the opening cutscene

I don’t want to give away the intro until the game is ready, but I’ll share parts of what I made. This first frame took me the longest, over 2 hours. I planned to animate the guy standing up and walking, but I now realize that that’s probably not feasible. I think it will look great anyway though. I might improve some little parts of the drawing.

Creating a cutscene manager in Godot

I set up an AnimationPlayer to direct the cutscene, and it’s actually quite easy. I do need to align my crossfades correctly and sync everything with the music.

Created a rough draft of the intro cutscene, and composed music for it

The intro cutscene/storyboard

I used libresprite to make a basic idea of what the intro cutscene should look like. I still have more to add, and as you can tell, the text is practically illegible. Yeah, libresprite doesn’t have a text tool. But I’ll fix it soon and it’ll look awesome.

The intro music

I made this song using FamiStudio with the EPSM expansion and FamiStudio’s default instrument pack. This let me use the instruments I wanted while still sounding retro-ish. My brother helped me work on the song, because he’s way better at music than I am. I still need to revise the song more, this is more of a first draft. Any feedback would be appreciated lol

Redoing the Player Movement

I remade the player movement system from scratch, because my previous implementation just wasn’t working. It was buggy, and the movement didn’t feel good to play.
My new movement system is not entirely complete, but it already feels much better. For one thing, the variable jump height is much smoother, and stopping a jump midair doesn’t feel as abrupt.
I added coyote time, jump buffering, air friction, and faster falling for game juice.
I still need to fine tune the settings, and get some more people to playtest the movement.
There are more movement mechanics I need to add, such as dashing, but I want to get the basic movement completely down first.

Started refactoring the player movement script. I’m starting from scratch, so I only have basic horizontal movement yet. I added an input sequence recorder to make it easier to replicate bugs, so you can record a sequence of inputs and then play them back again.

Fully refactored the level manager.
After a few hours, I have finally cleaned up all the code for level transitions. Now, the code is easier to understand and maintain, and adding new levels takes significantly less time and effort. I added comments on all the related code to make it even easier to read.
I also fixed a few bugs in the process. For example, trying to open the menu during a level transition used to put the game in a glitched state, but I fixed that now. I moved towards a cleaner architecture where the scene root (play.tscn) manages the game state, and the pause menu asks the play scene to open the menu, instead of just going ahead and doing it.
It’s possible that this refactor may have broken some other aspects of the game, so I’ll have to look over everything later, but right now, it seems to be working fine.

Polished the levels even more, added new art assets, and fixed some minor tile inconsistencies.
I also drew this boulder, which currently doesn’t look that great, but I’ll improve it later and add it somewhere where it fits in the game.
I showed this game to my grandma, and she was able to figure out the controls pretty quickly, so I see that as a win.

Greatly improved the facility’s tileset by adding details and more background elements.

Well, I tried to refactor the entire world system, but I gave up. It was just taking way too long. I guess I’ll just have to deal with the spaghetti code for now. I did finish the level select screen, and I think it looks pretty good. I just have to rename some of the levels because they are named very generic things.

I’m redoing the level system to clean up the spaghetti code situation. My teammate redesigned one of the characters, and I added it to the game.

I’m bettering my backgrounds, bettering my visuals, bettering my levels!

Added some more levels to my platformer game, and pretty much done-iffied the player sprite and sound effects

I’ve added a few more challenging levels. I also almost finished up the sprite work on the protagonist.