Hello to our 2 backers! You guys. What are you like.

Today's been spent cleaning up the various mess that was created in getting the demo (v0.2.3) ready for release. The demo seems to work alright (there've been no bugs reported yet somehow) but under the bonnet a lot of stuff was getting dangerously close to mimicking your average Wallace & Gromit setup.

Trailer

Oh, and the trailer's now on YouTube! This was an interesting job to assemble as we're devoid of linear editing experience in anything but Godot and, well, Flash. So, we used the former, captured a bunch of Godot animations with OBS, then chopped it all together with Kdenlive.

Now, if you're uninterested in coding - specifically with Godot - it'd probably be best to stop reading now, as it's time to go over how a bunch of the codebase has been reorganised and how this'll help the game be extensible enough to support its full form.

Unified collision management

As it stands (in the demo) collisions are dealt with mostly by the player's node, but also in, er, various other places. It was becoming difficult to know where the various effects of a given collision were being triggered.

As a result, levels now instruct a dedicated 'CollisionManager' to handle it all and inform the player, enemies, bullets etc. when they've come into contact. Tying up all of these inter-dependencies in one place makes the game much easier to debug.

This was a pretty painful refactor, reaching 30 files and weighing in at 739 changed/moved lines. Ouch. Additionally, as part of this, enemies and bosses were re-implemented as physics areas; they were static bodies, the latter of which caused some ugly, ugly hacking to be needed to ensure eg. the player couldn't get stuck inside the boss when it moved. No longer!™

That's all for now. These devlogs are pretty neat, maybe there'll be more soon; in the next one we'll almost certainly be covering the migration to Godot 3.2.4, which is on the cusp of release.【星川】

Edit (28/01/2021): we've done the 3.2.4 migration now; it was completely uneventful. Sorry everyone, no waffle to be had.