this week mostly concerned itself with levels and tutorials, and the first real art has been added

level scripts

this week i made good inroads on a new way to handle dialog and tutorials. i wanted something lightweight that i could easily edit, as opposed to the popups which are still quite clunky, or just making modified versions of the GameLevel class which would turn into headache central.

so each level now has a slot for its specific levelscript which is mounted to a Node when a level scene is instanced, this comes with a bunch of extra methods to do the sort of stuff that you’d usually want, and its mounting means that async commands are killed automatically when the mounted Node goes out of the scene (such as returning to the main menu). other features;

  • add dialog
  • pause and unpause
  • get enemies in the level or entities in the factory
  • react to events like firing a shot or getting hit
  • move camera

and it has reaction methods that connect to the level lifecycle, just load, start, finish, and unload. its lightweight but makes it really easy to chop and change character dialog, and make events reactive. ie

say you are asked to make a very large projectile, its now very easy to monitor all incoming projectile load requests and validate them, then pass on to the next objective without needing a bunch of additions to the help manager, the factory game manager, or any other high level system.

a few years ago i made a narrative adventure game in godot and making a system like this took months, this time it was knocked out in like a day.

real art

the Wall now has an actual sprite. the artist Rowan Oats (of rowanoats.com) and i had a lot of useful discussion about images sizes, priorities, and many other things.

less visually messy walls, far less distracting

the idea is that we want to add things in order of the amount of screen spare it consumes for now, so Walls were an obvious first choice, probably followed by background tiles, then conveyors, and so on. they’ve got a bunch of interesting ideas for further visual flare as well, which it’ll be fun to get into the game.

codex

the new codex, populated with help docs

this week saw a third remake of the way that info is stored in the game, with the old/new Codex system coming from a distant branch after much git history messing around.

this lets each knowledge section be displayed two ways; in a popup or in the codex with all popups also showing in the codex and gives us access to 3 modes of knowledge

  1. popups: things the player must know
  2. dialog: things the player should know
  3. codex: things the player can know

levels

i made a slight and obvious workflow change whereby i now just sketch out the levels before making them, this sounds easy and it is but its made it much easier to concentrate on actually making the levels

behold art

a few new levels have been added, and a few modified notably.

level 0 is now much better at explaining the factory side game with heavy dialog doing most of the lifting

level 1 is focuses on the shooting side of the game and similar does a better job

but now we also have

  • indirect fire and explosives
  • sniping
  • 2d bullet assemblies
  • weak points
  • bunkers

so this is 7 levels that all have distinct methods of play. not all are directly educational either and i’d like to make even less of them so. discovery balance is hard though.

blogger

i think i’ve said it before but damn blogger is irritating to use. i’m probably going to move this to its own page on rabbersoft.com.