@wilson_brunner

Crouching!

#2 in the player movement chronicles!

Surprisingly, I also managed to create a whole new 5 animations! slide, crouch idle, crouch walk, and the sledge versions (not slide cause ya can’t sprint with sledge). I implemented all but the slide, which’ll take a long time, so I’m going to keep it off a bit. This was really straight forward to add, and for the first time in a long time, i had like only 1 problem . I really just had a piece of code that asks, “did ya click the crouch button?” and if so, it toggles crouch. IF (and only if!) the crouch is on (or “true”) the idle and walk animations are switched to their respective crouch variants, and the normal player hitbox is replaced by a shorter-er-est one.

To bar the player from un-crouching in the midst of a tunnel, I added 2 new raycasts to the front and back of the players head facing up, these casts detect if there is a block above the player, and if either one of them detects anything, the player is unable to un-crouch until they are unshielded. Another quick thing I had to fix a bit was the raycasts detecting the player, which broke EVERYTHING so I just turned good ’ol collision mask/layer 20 into the super-cool (ALL-NEW !!) “player raycast collision!!!” which just only lets them interact with the floor and boxes, so yippee

NEXT STEPeths!:

-slide ):

-enemy lunge

-other player attacks (only hard attack right now which is bad)

Mantling and fixes
Hi.
I have had a very long week. I spent a lot of time working on sprites, mostly for the game 3rd level (no spoilers, (but that’s pretty boring) so heres the interesting part. I’ve been focusing on revamping player movement to make it feel more interesting and fun, and this is a good start.

Mantling!
if you don’t know what this is, it’s what you do when you get out of a pool without a ladder or staircase, pretty much just “pulling yourself up” The player does this by using raycasts, I added three, but one is for something else. One of them detects a wall in front of the player, and one detects a wall above. The code uses these casts to detect if the player is up against a wall, and if there is no wall above the player, pretty much checking if there is a mantalable ledge. If there is, the code says “you can mantle”
Another line says: if you can mantle, and you are not on the ground, and if the player clicked space (Jump), then mantle.
The annoying part was animations. When the player begins mantling, the hitbox and player position is frozen in space, and position is snapped to the nearest block to line up the animation. the only thing that moves during the animation is the player sprite, which means at the end of the animation, when the players position is finally changed, the player sprite needs to snap back at the EXACT same time, or it looks bad, which was hard. The other annoying part was the camera snapping randomly, as it moves with the player and not the sprite. I fixed this by just temporarily turning on the cameras position smoothing while the mantle is happening and then turning it off when the player moves again.

sprites!
done some stuff, mostly just game planning (sadly didn’t get time for because notes but I got a lot done, mostly just some serious drawing. I finished some tiles for the first and second levels, and some tiles for the next three.

Quick hurt animations

Main thing I added was animations for death and injury. I first added knockback when hit. It just takes the player’s scale.x (what i use for flipping the sprite) and multiplies it by 200 to the player velocity, since the scale is either 1 or -1, it changes the direction the player is thrown (in the future i’d like to make the scale the enemies direction, not the players, as if the player is flipped in the wrong direction, it could have knockback in the wrong direction (very bad) Theres was already a variable to detect if the player was being hit that was used for testing, so I just implemented that to play the injury animations. i also detected if the players health was zero or below after being hit, and if so it would make the player play the death animation instead of the injury. I have currently unimplemented animations for a before-death injured player, so after they are hit for the last time they will stand for a bit before collapsing.

NEXT STUFF: (hast beeneth narrowed list)

-add enemy knockback (only when injured, lok wierd when die)
-fix player knockback

thank yoh forth coming to my TED talk

I’m gonna start this by saying:
I HATE animating!

Aseprite made this so much easier, but GOD this was difficult…
I think I had 5 situations this time around where the problem was the littlest change in the world, and I just needed to go to bed. I made 3 different walk cycles, before giving up and figuring out how to do it for real, it was only a little difficult after that. I have unused hurt, death, and push animations, and need to implement a shorter attack and smooth some things out still (jumping while attacking cough)

Almost all of these 12 hours was fixing stupid little problems and changing little pixels, probably some of the worst time ive spent on this project yet… (but still really interesting)

NEXT STEPS:::

-fix walk so it looks sensible (drifting)
-make jumping illegal hwilst attacking
-add short attack
-customized tile map ?????

Thank you for reading goodbye I want to stop animating

enemy attacks/better particles.

This took some work, but not really…
The enemy can now attack and hurt the player the codes really just the same as the player attacking the enemies. Theres a hurtbox in the player that gets hit by an area in the enemy that makes them take damage.

The particles took some more difficult work. Godot has CPU and GPU particles, which apparently are different, it just depends on what in your computer renders them. I used GPU particles, because they run better and can collide with things. I whipped up a sprite sheet for the particles in Aseprite, which looked a lot better than the weird purple generic Godot things. The particles only collided with light occluders??, so I added an occlusion layer to the tile map, at some point I hope to create a better system for when they hit the ground, but thats not my priority right now.

Next STEPS!!!!!
-main thing is that the enemy has a lunge attack that I haven’t implemented yet, so thats next.
-starting on the player sprites, this is a LOT of work, so its gonna take me a lot of time, but no time like the present

Some more enemy development!

-first “enemy” in the game, a pretty basic little thing.
-designed on Aseprite, took some time to set up with hakatime, but turns out I was using a version only used on Mac OS, so no kidding it was giving me trouble
-I created unused animations for a lunge and whip attack animations that I will implement soon (?).

NEXT STEPS :D :
-stop the player from colliding with the enemy’s hitbox, it’s very annoying, and in the future will we a necessity for having many creatures in the same room
-add the enemy attacks, I’ll probably just use a raycasy to see if the players close enough, and then make it hit, pretty simple…

Also get Aseprite, it’s like 20 bucks but it’s a really good software, also it’s just really good for game making. gasp :D

Basis of an enemy AI!!!
the beginnings…
I feel like ten hours is a little much for just this, but there was so much work to do.

The main step began with a pretty simple area. It just detects if the player enters. The code uses the player position (or “target” position in the code), and subtracts it from the enemy position, if the numbers greater than 1 it moves one way and if less than -1 other. (The buffer in-between the 2 is just for smoothing)

If the player is within the hitbox, the enemy shoots out a ray cast towards the player. If it touches the player, it lets the enemy move, if it hits a box or the ground first it doesn’t, pretty simple, till you realize what can go wrong…

For clarification i have NO CLUE why any of what i did helped, but it did so yippee!!! The first problem was that the enemy would only detect the player if they were off the ground. I tried to fix this by forcing the ray cast to not interact with the Tile Map (which wouldn’t have worked anyways, because it still needs to so the objects can block the enemy’s sight). I set a piece of code to print what the enemy was interacting with, and it turns out it was the background? (I know, weird?) I seperated the background and collision ground into 2 tile layers, then turned of collisions for the back layer.

After that there was some glitchy stuff which you can see in the video a bit, but I fixed almost all of it with literally one if statement that only lets the player become a target for the code

(My code is a modified version from this website) / / / / /
Godot 3.0: Visibility with Ray-casting · KCC Blog

Devlog #4?

3 big things this time, physics blocks, destructive blocks, and stamina upgrades.

Physics!:
-just a block but it’s a “rigid body”, so Godot gives it physics.
-It uses some “borrowed code” to detect if the player is colliding with something and then add the players velocity to it.*
-I had to change the hitbox of the floor to be a collision polygon, instead of one per block, which made the pushing kind of shotty.**
Destruction!:
-Really simple… just an enemy that can’t move or fight back. I added an animation so you can tell it’s getting hit but that’s the most complicated it got.
Stamina! (it’s better):
-I added 3 major things, though 2 of them are pretty small. First, I added a bar, Godot has a built-in progress bar node, so I just mapped the value from 0 - 10, and used the stamina value from the player as the value input
-SECOND! I changed the recharge, instead of a variable that goes up when a timer ends, it now uses a move_toward() function to make the stamina tick up smoothly.
-thirdibidily, a pause. Mainly because irl and in games you don’t just start recharging as soon as you stop moving. This uses a float that begins to tick up when the player starts moving, and when it surpasses a certain point, it allows the stamina to recharge.
Final stuff!!!
-I’ll start focusing on:
-more indepth weapons
-and maybe ai for enemies… probs something with raycasts………..

Sprinting!

took a bit, but I finally got sprinting to work.
Works pretty simply, the characters motion is determined by a speed variable, which just increases if the sprint button (shift) is held down.
Here’s the code:
if Input.is_action_just_pressed(“sprint”) and stamina >= 1:
state_machine.travel(“sprint”)
sprinting_timer.start()
SPEED = 200
sprinting = true
elif Input.is_action_just_released(“sprint”):
SPEED = 75
sprinting = false
sprinting_timer.stop()
I’m using an animation_tree for my animations, instead of just a player, this helps the transitions from animations feel smoother, so thats what the “state_machine” is. The “sprinting” variable is used to force other animations (e.g, for idling and running) to check if the player is sprinting, and thus not override the animation (the sprinting animation currently is identical to running, but when I start designing the character i’ll change that). The timer is just on a .5 sec loop, and makes the stamina decrease when it ends, the second bit of code checks if you stopped sprinting, and returns the SPEED to normal and stops the timer loop.

This code doesn’t actually fully work, as another if statement is needed. The extra “and” in the first check makes sure you can’t start sprinting if stamina is below one, but actually only checks once when you start sprinting, not constantly, so the sprinting doesn’t stop if stamina goes below 1 (like it should).
if stamina < 1:
SPEED = 75
sprinting_timer.stop()
sprinting = false

This code, unlike the first “if”, checks consistantly if stamina’s below one, and does the same job as if you let go of sprinting. This keeps stamina from going negative D:

In the future I plan on adding a gradient to the effect, so the speed up isn’t as jarring, but this is a good start!

Thanks to Brackeys for the current assets! (go watch his video on Godot, it’s very informative)

~wil

Finally started to develop a “game”

made 3 things, Attacks, Stamina, and GUI

Attacks:
->use hurtboxes detect if an area entered, if that area is_in_group(“attackarea”) the hurtbox takes a damage variable and applies it to the thing it’s attached too (Player, enemy, etc)

Stamina:
-> A timer slowly makes it tick upwards, starts at 10, and goes down if the player jumps or attacks, uses a Global Variable allow the GUI to display the stamina (there’s probably a better way but I’m lazy ¯_(ツ)_/¯)

GUI:
->uses a canvas layer being displayed over a sub-viewport, which includes the coins and stamina, just displays text and then the quantities of each integer.

next steps:
->destructible blocks
->physics blocks
->stamina bar (not integer)
->sprinting (and smoother movement.

Thanks to Brackeys for the assets!

Finally done learning basic Godot!!

My entire time has been dedicated to just learning how to use the software, and I’m glad to say I now have something to work off of. I still need to learn more, like GDscript, pixel art, and game design.

Next Steps!

-develop weapon (sledgehammer :D)
-destructible terrain elements (fancy walls that get destroyed)
-physics blocks
-begin designing character and aliens