leafygreen

 I added a simple vertex shader to the dashes that "smears" the mesh. It took me an embarassingly long time because I'm pretty bad at shaders. Right now the dash is a solid color but it'll be easy to add a texture to it later on. I used this ue4 tutorial as a guide for getting the general idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDgAAwbKFZU but I didn't follow it too closely since I wanted to puzzle it out. Pressing launch in air now allows for the opposite of a launch, a fast fall attack of some sort. Right now only gauntlets' is implemented and it does a down punch and a straight down crash into the ground that has a decent attack radius. I'm in the process of updating a bunch of older animations and adding new ones, since sword's are all really old + chain is way too short. I'm also starting on sound soon, so hopefully that'll add a new level. Added support for different flinch animations so now the enemy can have different "damaged" ...

I added a couple more animations and dashes for each weapon. Every weapon has a launch now. The base animation set of attacks is almost finished with the exception of redoing them to be better, a long term goal. There's probably going to be a few additions along the way but I want to focus on making the rest of the prototype and polishing the combat before going further. I need to add more particle effects and sound effects soon. I also had to restructure my attack state logic because it was causing an annoying bug, and that took a chunk of time. I'm still tweaking launch and jump code as well. Screenshake has been added for each attack (just a very subtle small one) and it has helped with the attacks being slightly crunchier. Dashes also make the player character invisible for just a touch of time, but shaders, my dreaded enemy are going to be needed to help sell the effect more. In addition, I feel like one thing that's missing is more movement options that are more smoot...

Just a bunch of random stuff this update Halberd now has a full set of on ground attack animations, still thinking about the air ones. Running and Idle now have separate animations based on each weapon. They're not great but they exist. I'll be iteratively improving them since I'm still learning how to animate. I am now working on more character designs. For now the characters may be placed in as sketches for placeholders rather than anything too finished. Gauntlet has tweaked particle effects and also particle effects for movement as well. There's still stuff to be done, for example the launch for gauntlet is supposed to toss a rock into the air as well.  I adjusted the look of the environment slightly so I have more shadows, before I think it was too bright. At the same time there's no shadows cast on the terrain by the walls of the canyon and I'm not sure why.   I've added some screen pause when hits connect but I think screen shaking will be needed for m...

 I updated the combat system again, really focusing on making it more interesting. This mainly consisted of small tweaks. On ground attacks now push the enemy in the direction of the attack. Ground attacks can also juggle enemies that are already in air, but might be a little hard to see on the fly trap enemy. I implemented the new jump that I mentioned in an earlier post and it allows the player to jump faster and fall faster compared to the enemy.  Some attacks do a "float" where the vertical velocity is 0 for a certain amount of time or some do a "bump" which is a very small launch. Most ground attacks are bumps. I'm planning to put the launch attacks on their own separate button later on for ease of use (right now they're part of the combo). This is variable for different attacks. Combo canceling happens if the user double taps a directional arrow. In addition, I've changed up gauntlet's air attacks, added particle effects to the gauntlet attacks...

I wanted to increase the speed of the initial launch for the jump. The launch system in my game is set up so that I can specify a launch type and the launch type is described by a math function. So I played around with some math functions and the function I found fit my needs the best was an arctan function shifted slightly so the rise starts near or a little past 0. However, there was also the issue that this function does not return downwards and going from one type of jump to another results in choppy movement. So I ended up adding a parabola so it was carctan(cx) + c + gravx2 + cx + c where c is some arbitrary constants (not all the same). I had to play around with the constants to get the height I wanted. This allowed me to get a fast jump upwards but a gradual descent downwards. Red is the arctan + parabola and blue is the original launch function (just a parabola). Note: This arc shows y position over time.

 I started working the protag's home, which is a repurposed castle tower that fell into the canyon a long time ago. I just thought it might be cool to do something instead of a simple shack or generic house. The tower took a couple days to do since just painting the tileable brick texture took an entire day due to painting each individual brick.  I'm not planning to do a smooth transition between the internal building and outside environment in order to cut corners, so I'll just do scene switching. One thing that I've discovered with scene switching is static variables do not reset between scenes (this makes sense but its a rather obscure thing to keep track of), and that actually caused a few problems with my character controller the first time I tried it. I'll probably return to tweaking the combat system next week. There's still a whole bunch of animations that need to be made as well. internals, not fully lit yet, have to build outside env around it model in...

 I've been messing around with large prop art, specifically environment. For the first area, I wanted something based off of water carved canyons cause they're gorgeous and also because I wanted a tall, large environment. There's still a lot of tweaking needed, like extra plants or additions just so the canyon doesn't feel so empty. The floor is also extremely low poly so I have to bevel some ledges. I'm also running into big performance hits when the resolution is large + most frame drops come from lighting and shadows so I have to look into that. I'm hoping godot 4 will help optimize things a bit. Sky texture from Richard Whitelock: https://godotengine.org/asset-library/asset/221 Oct22 update - This week I've just been stepping back from animations or the combat system, just need a break from them, so I went on a modeling spree. Realistically, these water canyons don't have much plant life at all, probably because of the regular flooding that occurs. T...