leafygreen

The reasons for the infrequent updates is cause there's only so much to talk about upgrading and that was all I was doing, no new and shiny stuff. It took me quite a while because the combat system is still pretty complex. Things are looking good though, I've got most combat system stuff working and in Godot 4. I fixed a few issues coming from 3->4 with bugs that never really showed up in 3.  Added a new simple camera that just passively follows the player around so that if there's no target its always moving to go behind the character. Also just generalized some things with the targeting camera since it was hardcoded before and stabilized it a little. Lots of small cleanup things. Due to the changes in Godot 4, I made it so the player character will slip on slopes when landing on enemies because having the player land on the enemy and stay there was a funny occurrence that was happening more than it should have been. The opposite can also happen but its far rarer. One t...

I've started the process of converting my C# godot 3.5 proj to 4.0 since Godot just hit RC 1 for Godot 4. I decided it'd be worth it for the efficiency gains but I was also pleased to see the extremely simplified move and slide method as well as the grounded and constant velocity additions to the CharacterBody3D class. I figured given the amount of time it takes to bake a simple lightmap I should probably just upgrade to 4 first. I ran the auto converter which seems a tad buggy and changes a few things it shouldn't but it seems mostly ok. Major things to note are: Luckily I haven't really gotten far in actually making maps so all i have are prototype maps that would've been tossed out anyways. Most of the work has been on the characters, so rebuilding them should get me most of my progress back. I'll probably have to reanimate the particle effects, luckily I didn't have very many. On top of that my old file structure was a mess so this gives me a chance to r...

 Not dead yet, I've been busy recently and without my main computer so things have been a bit slow. I've started putting in some meshes into the map and put an especially large one in (some test generated terrain from blender). This took a chunk of fps out (and I'm pretty sure it isn't the number of polygons) so I'm pretty sure at this point using lightmaps will result in the biggest performance boost since right now everything is dynamically lit. I'm also changing up the crappy gauntlet dash and have a new idea to put in. Quick screenshot of how things look now. I'll be putting in a lot of tall grass later and considering some far away meshes that'll be obscured by fog. I might just go and buy some assets for that since I don't want to spend the time on that (I know they'll take me a stupid amount of time to texture) and I'm betting if I put in some really heavy fog some mountains in a slightly different stylized artstyle shouldn't resul...

I've added in custom key binding in the pause screen. It is via a very rudimentary place holder that doesn't look too good, but it works, and it'll be useful for the demo. There's no checking to see if two actions share the same key yet, so the user is going to have to be careful. The gui will be easy to replace later with actual assets and I wrote it so adding a new button is a simple one line function call. I'm still thinking about what to add to the gauntlet weapon that'll make it more unique and also helpful. Eventually the crappy hp bar will be replaced too. Also threw together a toon shader, mainly focusing on faces first. It's extremely simple, relying on a gradient texture and the usual normal dot light calculation, the lighting color is factored into the calculation, but multiple lights do not stack in intensity since this would result in a lot of weird looking transitions. The plan is to use a custom gradient texture, based on each materials/enviro...

I'm a bit frustrated with the implementation of one feature at the moment, so I'm moving to graphics for a while. I've been experimenting with creating skyboxes this week, many premade ones have a ground texture that don't fit with the style of my game, otherwise I would've planned to buy them already. I think that'll be the last hurdle for the demo, then it should be mostly just me doing stuff I should already know. So the updates may be a bit slow because of the experimenting and learning phase.

 Camera testing this week. I think I found a targeting camera that works or at least it doesn't make me dizzy. I get dizzy from some first person games so I guess that's a good test. Still going to need to get more feedback though.  The new animations mentioned in the last post have not been imported yet, so everything's still old n janky. This camera had a few things that I had to keep in mind. 1. It had to keep the enemy and player in view at all times.  2. if the player dashes or the enemy dashes, the camera should not immediately swap to another view just to make sure the camera is "behind the player" again. This was the most frequent issue with the old targeting system. 3. when the player circles the enemy, the camera rotation shouldn't be too fast but that's only when the player is close (since the interpolation is much faster for something close) I basically took the basic targeting camera (which is always behind the player's position and lookin...

 Lots of animation work this week since I didn't have access to Godot. tweaked multiple animations on Sera and Rhys, added a third attack for Sera. I also have a new idea for an ability on Rhys which will hopefully help out players a little. I'm planning on looking at the camera next week, I have a few ideas I want to try.