Sorry about the late update. I went on a 2 week trip to Japan and didn’t have time to post.
After coming up with the basic idea of ‘Kindle in the Night’, I started working on the demo. So far, I have set up my project in Github and created basic movements for the player.
Setting up the project in Godot
Since the game needed an efficient way to deal with mouse-click inputs, I thought using C++ to create a module to handle input events would help optimize the game and be useful when porting the game to consoles later.
And I can learn C++ in a fun way along the progress, right? So I setted up GDExtension for C++ binding. (You can check out the official guideline and video for set up below)
Turns out C++ is too difficult to start off writing practical code as a beginner, and GDExtension is not a good place to start. After many failed attempts that got me to no where, I changed my plan to mainly using GDScript for the demo, while studying C++ on the side.
Creating basic player movement
And this is the progress I made so far.
First, I created a particle that releases on mouse clicks, and shows the location.
Next, I created the player and a basic tile map using the free asset linked below.
But I soon realized the proportions of the tiles didn’t match the proportions I needed. So I made a simple floor tile with the desired proportions.
I then created the code and animations for the basic player movements. This is the code I wrote.
extends CharacterBody2D
@onready var anim: AnimationPlayer = get_node("AnimationPlayer")
@onready var hit_area: CollisionShape2D = get_node("PlayerHitArea")
var target_position: Vector2
var GRAVITY = ProjectSettings.get_setting("physics/2d/default_gravity")
var SPEED = 150
const POS_BUFFER = 3
const ROLL_DISTANCE = 75
const JUMP_VELOCITY = -400
func _ready():
# set current position to target_position
target_position = position
anim.play("idle")
func _input(event):
# update target_position & set speed on mouse-click event
if event.is_action_pressed("move"):
target_position = get_global_mouse_position()
SPEED = 150 # default speed
if event.double_click:
SPEED = 220 # fast speed
if event.is_action_pressed("roll") and is_on_floor():
var roll_dir = get_global_mouse_position().x - position.x
target_position.x += (roll_dir/abs(roll_dir)) * ROLL_DISTANCE
SPEED = 150 # default speed
func _physics_process(delta):
# add gravity
if not is_on_floor():
velocity.y += GRAVITY * delta
var directionX = target_position.x - position.x
var directionY = target_position.y - position.y
if abs(directionX) > POS_BUFFER and position.x != target_position.x:
# flip player direction
if directionX < 0:
get_node("AnimatedSprite2D").flip_h = true
else:
get_node("AnimatedSprite2D").flip_h = false
# move player to target position
if Input.is_action_pressed("move"):
velocity.x = (directionX/abs(directionX)) * SPEED
anim.play("run")
elif Input.is_action_pressed("roll"):
velocity.x = (directionX/abs(directionX)) * SPEED
anim.play("roll_start")
# disable hit-area during roll
hit_area.disabled = true
else:
velocity.x = 0 # reset velocity
hit_area.disabled = false # reset hit-area
anim.play("idle")
if velocity.y > 0:
anim.play("fall")
move_and_slide()
The _input() function sets the target position and the speed value when an mouse click event happens.
If the left button is clicked, the target position is set to the position of the mouse click and the player moves toward the target position.
If its double-clicked, the speed is set faster and the player moves faster.
The right button is the ‘roll’ button, so when its clicked, the target position is set to a roll distance to the left or right, depending on the position of the mouse click. The player then ‘rolls’ to the target position, which looks more like a crawl now because the asset didn’t have an animation for roll.
And as you can see I disabled the hit-area during roll so the player can be invincible during rolls.
So now it looks like this.
Next time, I will tackle on adding ladders to climb up and down. I will also try adding a navigation feature to automatically find the closest path, just like in ‘This War of Mine’.
See you next time!