potatoptarmigans gamedev blog

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...

 I'm replacing a bunch of cgs in ALAWT. It's really forcing me to try harder at drawing and I guess that's good but it also kind of sucks. I've got 2 done, but I'd like to finish up a third before considering any sort of update. I've also rewritten some lore to make things slightly more mysterious. I feel like Lea was too knowledgeable before and I want her to be less omniscient.

 Updated the very old crappy falling animations with unique ones for both Sera and Lea. They'll also do a landing animation when falling. While the characters can't really jump (mainly due to control constraints) I'm planning on some puzzles that'll require going up and down. I updated the menu and dialogue GUI to be consistent, and the dialogue boxes are all in dark mode now instead of an eyebleeding white. I also updated the main menu with a new one. I'm still debating how I'll color it and there's some improvements I could make (I am held back by my skill in 2d art), but at least it's better than the current placeholder. The last bits of visual overhaul I have to do is fix up some of the old particle effects. Sera's slash has already been updated to be a gooey red one to fit her mutated arm. Then I plan to test and put out an (small) update. The big one will contain the boss and more character interactions as well as some rewritten lore. Ideally, ...

 Got all the portraits done. I'm about 85% happy with them. They're not quite at the level I'd like them to be but that comes with more practice and time. I can always replace them later, but I'd rather have something halfway decent instead of the uncolored sketches in a square I had before. Got a whole bunch of prototype assets replaced. I'm still doing some more stuff to add grunge to the walls. Will go back to the tunnel boss soon, but I think I'll push up an update with all this new polished stuff after testing.

 I've gotten multiple features needed for the boss fight working. Made a turret with a locked angle constraint, polished how the hit effects work (they'll spawn on the model in the y location that you hit them in while rotated at the correct angle) instead of just a static location/rotation attached to the spine bone. Also, the platform moves properly. I'm still working on character portraits and adjusting all the lighting in the locations. This time around I'd also like to bake the lighting for optimization. I'm also working on some tooling to further streamline the Blender to Godot pipeline.