potatoptarmigans gamedev blog

Unfortunately no new pretty things to look at. The boss fight code is about 80% finished, just have one more thing I wanted to add: a new skill for Sera that players should be making use of during the fight. Still have pretty much all of the art assets to texture and still need to design the look of the new enemy. However, before that I am refactoring the entire nearly five year old character controller code. The reason is because I have some weapons that will be able to affect the controller's movement as well as other things. The current code is basically way too much stuffed into the controller and too many things are doing the same thing, the product of someone(me) who could implement certain features but not in a robust or modular way. So now I'm refactoring things so that everything is not only more simplified but more modularized and less buggy. This had to be done for a while, but I had put it off until I realized that I was just adding to more technical debt. This refa...

 Still working on first boss fight. Spent a lot (more than I would've liked) of time debugging issues with hit detection. This was mainly due to the IntersectRay method I was using to do raycasts for shooting enemies. It would just sometimes miss the colliders no matter what I did when it came to Area3Ds. There didn't appear to be a problem if the colliders were StaticObject3Ds. I'm still not sure what the issue is, but I found raycast3ds to be more reliable. On top of that, I swapped to having hurtboxes just send a signal to a database to store the enemy hurtbox inside it when the mouse entered the Area3D and remove on exit. Then I'd just call damage separately. This was extremely reliable and the player longer misses things as long as they click the hurtbox. However, I didn't want players to have to only click on enemies for it to register a hit, I wanted them to be able to click past an enemy and still hit them so long as the raycast hits, so I added some extra h...

 Working on some necessary features for first boss (spontaneous enemy spawning). I am also revisiting Sera's health loss mechanic. I'm going to remove the health loss on basic attacks (though health loss will be bigger for certain things like the oneshot attacks, mainly because using those might help you avoid even heavier health loss.) I think it's a little too difficult to manage for some people whom I've seen die in the game because of Sera's health loss mechanic more than anything else.  I plan to introduce more enemies as a result, to sort of "overwhelm" the players into having to use Lea's limited ammo instead of just hanging back and letting Sera do all the work, although I guess if players are good at juking I'll allow it, may as well be a legit way to play. Later enemies will be faster to the point Lea cannot outrun them and they will specifically target Lea.

It's the big update. Updated things on itch io with new binaries. 1. Visual overhaul. New mainmenu, updated lighting, updated GUI, updated particle effects. Replaced all prototype models and icons. More detail added. Lower resolutions are better supported now. A prologue scene has been added with some extra stuff. 2. Added a massive amount of fixes and nice to haves, Sera will automatically open doors now, have fun calling her to Lea from the other corner of the map. Key config fixed and actually saves. GUI elements scroll properly now and fit more resolutions. Enemies dissolve on death. Cameras will focus on targets of interest when applicable. 3. Fixed a lot of bugs in general. 4. A rewrite to a lot of stuff. 5. New cutscene art. 6. Lea can talk to Sera by interacting with her 7. Way smaller filesize, lots of unnecessary bloat was removed. The first boss fight is the next thing I'm working on.

The pathfinding is way better now. Sera and enemies can now navigate to a spot on the map and open all the doors on the way without prompting (Unless the door is locked, this is actually a bug in old ALAWT, Sera and enemies can open doors Lea doesn't have the required items for).The return home button can even let her run all the way across the map to Lea. Everyone's obstacle detection raycast is way better and Sera's a lot less likely to get stuck on stuff. I basically ended up rewriting the move state and the obstacle detection (which also had logic errors). Now it's not just cleaner and readable code, it's a lot more stable. It was a bit tricky though because just shooting a raycast directly towards a target sometimes led to weird results. In particular, a raycast from Sera to the lower platforms after the heavy bunker door would cause her to think there was an obstacle (the bunker door) between her and those lower platforms. She would then try to get to the lowe...

I did a lot of necessary but boring stuff. I modularized the interactable system so now it's a lot more flexible than it was before. In the past I could only have an animated interactable or one that could be picked up. Now Interactables can do both, and have extra functionality tacked on them. Fixed a countless number of bugs ranging from the enemies not pushing the players when hitting them to preventing Lea from peeking past some room occluders. Added in nice things like restoring interactable states after loading (so you don't have to resolve certain puzzles after saving and reloading. Restoring current weapon held on the characters as well as removing key items after they've been used. I rewrote some convoluted code where the logic made no sense to me and it also fixed multiple bugs. Gui element lists scroll now. Basically things are a lot more polished now, with just a few things left like needing to save custom key configs and accessibility. Working on getting a dysl...