leafygreen

 I've been trying to do further optimization due to large fps drops on my budget pc on empty scenes with just a few character controllers. This looked like it was mainly from two things, creating rayshapes/raycasts spontaneously (its ok if they're already created) and too many bones on one character controller. I went from 112->58 bones on my main character, and this gave me back about 20 fps. Removing all runtime created rayshapes and raycasts was also about 15 fps. Notably, my character controllers are fairly complex at this point, with rayshapes for hurtboxes and attack areas, and the enemies constantly poll for player location - yet these were not the bottlenecks (I tested out disabling them) - however, I do set the navigation polling for enemies to every 2 seconds and not every frame. I also moved all processing for the state machine from a node tree to internal classes, but I didn't notice too much of a difference. It gave me a chance to refactor a lot of the code ...

 This week was mainly implementing a lot of must haves for a game - save and load system, pickup items and interactable items. I'm happy to say much of its done, still missing a few other things. Then I'll extend the enemy controller for a little more intelligence. Not much to show yet.

 I'm throwing together some prototype models from my older models to use for the next game. Sera gets to wear a full suit this time around. I've done a few things to the current ver of Rhys N Iris in preparation for the new game. I think I'll implement everything first then start designing. There's a few things that would be useful for Rhys N Iris if I do end up going back to it, like inventory and interactable items. A few additions to enemies would help too like patrolling. I'm also planning mouse and controller options as well.  So far this week the interaction and object pickup system is being designed and implemented. Enemies can now be automatically added to a scene (before there was a lot of manual work involved). The projects been updated to Godot 4.2 - important since that one has a better particle system.  Like the attack system, I aim to make the new systems as modular and flexible as possible, mainly relying on data files for behavior. Once all these sys...

 There was a bit of a crunch unfortunately in order to get things in before the jam finished. Initially I wasn't going to do ending sketches, but then it turned into wanting people to connect to the characters more, so more writing got added and so did ending cgs. The ending cgs aren't really the quality of the sprites because I had to do 3 of them in 3 weeks and was burning out somewhat. I'm not really the fastest or most skilled 2d artist so that was rough. I thought that I had enough time with an entire extra year after last year but I think that there was a lot more work than I thought there was. I also wanted to polish stuff more, especially the vfx but just couldn't do it in time for the jam. I wanted to dig more into the writing too but once again, lack of time was the major problem. When I first started this project a few years ago, I had some 3d modeling knowledge and programming but knew nothing about game development. I've learned a lot now, so I'm ho...