PingZing

Finally landed on a health restoration mechanics I like. #indiegames #indiedev #gamedev #screenshotsaturday

Been doing some work on the title and settings screens. Also finally got the player's weapon sprited! #indiegames #indiedev #gamedev

Been working on implementing a "choose an option" dialogue. But that's boring! So instead, have a before-and-after of me cleaning up my "rocky cliffs" tiles. #indiegames #indiedev #gamedev

Couldn't resist tweaking it. Now it's perfect. Searches 6 pixels in either direction to find an open space. If it finds it, it gently slides the player over at 25% speed. #indiegames #indiedev #gamedev

Implemented player nudging. If you run into a wall, and the game detects you're near open space, it'll gently nudge you toward it. Should help navigating narrow spaces. #indiegames #indiedev #gamedev

Our protagonist has a new color scheme, and a few new rooms to explore. #indiegames #indiedev #gamedev #screenshotsaturday

Hell yeah. My game has a silent protagonist, so all their characterization has to come from other characters and narration. And you get to invent lots of little characters with fun little stories that live in your head!

This was what my testing area looked like once I'd finished getting everything working again. Look at her go! #indiegames #indiedev #gamedev

Had to fix up some of my reflection math. That meant reworking all the player character's secondary sprites' reflection offsets. Accidentally left animation interpolation on for the tail. #indiegames #indiedev #gamedev

Been quiet about the game, but I've been making some progress on cutscenes. But mostly, I've been waiting for... player character sprites! #indiegames #indiedev #gamedev

The second is more exciting for me personally: a dialogue previewer! No more booting up the game just to see if my dialogue actually fits, or if it feels right! I reused my existing DialogueBox control with *almost* no changes. #indiegames #indiedev #gamedev

Two things tonight! The first is short and sweet. The inventory has a blinky cursor now! Also planning on adding a little panel to the top with item names. #indiegames #indiedev #gamedev

Because my Player is made up of multiple sprites, I had to attach a Reflector component to each sprite. This had some interesting side effects at first... (Reflectors can now specify an offset to deal with this.) #indiegames #indiedev #gamedev

Working on an interior scene, as it's part of the first major cutscene. Part of it calls for the player character to look into a mirror, which meant I had to figure out How To 2D Mirror. Very happy with the result though! #indiegames #indiedev #gamedev

Oh, almost forgot! Before this, I got my cutscene system built! I still need to teach it a few more commands, but it can move entities around, and that's a big part of what I needed! #indiegames #indiedev #gamedev

Started working on Y-Sorting (i.e. allowing things to go behind other things). Realized I'd have to move *every* entity's relative position up one tile. Did so. Broke the *hell* out of pathfinding. Was forced to invent some better debugging visualizations. #indiegames

Slowly chipping away at the stuff I need to start doing cutscenes. It's not interesting to show, because it's re-treading old ground re: pathfinding, etc, just with more stuff under the hood. So, instead... #indiegames #indiedev #gamedev

Starting to add some interactions. Getting some ideas for puzzles and like... Actual Gameplay(tm). #indiegames #indiedev #gamedev

Two new enemies! With that, I think I have all the enemies I need for this region. (fun fact: the plants are called "Birds of Perdition") (even more fun fact: lookit that angry eyebrow on the boar. I love it.) #indiegames #indiedev #gamedev

Added a "PeacefulSleep" component that makes enemies invincible and solid. It also puts these little crab guys to sleep! #indiegames #indiedev #gamedev

Upscaling should help a bit.

Let's see how Bsky compression handles... ...tiny enemy crab! #indiedev #gamedev #indiegames

Mostly work in less visually-cool infrastructure stuff. Except: Shaders are cool. #indiedev #gamedev #indiegames

We got a player inventory! We got an item acquisition cutscene! We got animations moving stuff from the world into the UI with only a minimum of jank! #indiedev #gamedev #indiegames

Been doing a bunch of work under the hood for the past week or so. A major milestone: things can take damage and be defeated now! #indiedev #gamedev #indiegames

Starting to get interaction into the game. We now have an Interactable component, and I'm starting to hook up the dialogue box. Still need to freeze the world when dialogue is on display, but we're halfway there. #indiedev #gamedev #indiegames

Haha! BBCode formatting that gets preserved across automatic page breaks! I had to do some intense shenanigans, and I am definitely not using RichTextLabel the way you're supposed to. But it works! #indiedev #gamedev #indiegames

And now for something completely different. Dialogue boxes! It's a rewrite of a Godot 3.3 box from my previous project, and is also built on RichTextLabel. It does letter-at-a-time, automatic line and page breaking, and allows for input breaks and variable speeds. #indiedev #gamedev #indiegames

Generalized pathfinding! I tried so hard to make my enemy avoidance use AStarGrid2D's concept of solid nodes, but couldn't get good performance out of it. In the end, I opted for a simple HashSet of occupied cells, and a check for occupancy in the movement update code. #indiedev #gamedev #indiegames

A very (very) rough proof-of-concept of pathfinding! I'm using Godot's AStarGrid2D which, on one hand, is lovely and simple. On the other hand, building a nav grid is awkward--it doesn't interact with other TileMapLayer stuff at all. But it works! Look at him go! #indiedev #gamedev #indiegames

Okay. We got doors, folks. They can point to any other room, anywhere *in* that room, and they can define both an exit and an entrance animation per-door. It also turned my room transition code into an absolute unholy spaghetti mess. #indiedev #gamedev #indiegames

Transitions are now generalized! Any of the four cardinal directions work (and there's a fifth variety, for things like staircases and doors). Individual rooms can override transition logic, but if they don't, the default is to just "find a room to the N/E/S/W of me". #gamedev #indiedev #indiegames

Screen transition! Just the one. It's hardcoded to work for Exactly That Screen, moving in Exactly That Direction. But the concept works! #gamedev #indiedev #indiegames

Trying my hand at a tiny game. It's much more narrowly-scoped than my last one, so it may actually get done. ...maybe. Anyway, things can now deal and receive damage. But there's no concept of health, or even damage numbers, yet. #gamedev #indiedev #indiegames

Finally, this one's a little more experimental: MoreTails! This is a tiny, fledgling, may-never-be-completed modding API for the recently-released Kitsune Tails! The game already supports custom levels and custom Lua minigames, but I wanted the ability to do more.