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[xtekker]

I've been absolutely floored recently, I have exactly 80 followers and so many of you have reached out asking about Doomscroller, what happened to it? Why no more updates n such?

Quite frankly, it shocked me, I never expected anyone to enjoy my game yet especially via just screenshots of development but you guys see something in this project and that is really touching.

It's with a heavy heart that I share with you that I lost my father on January 10th to a rare form of leukaemia, so development has been understandably paused for now.

My brother and I have spoken and we definitely want to continue the development of Doomscroller, we love what we've created so far and we want to see how far we can take it but for now, the siren of real life is calling for our attention and we must heed the call.

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So, Microsoft is terrible. Yes yes, the oldest claim in the world.

But specifically... I just hate how Windows 10 tries to conflate and confuse web searches with things on one's own computer. The start menu should never do anything related to web-searching, especially if it purports to try to give examples of things that are on my hard drive!

This will make old, computer-illiterate people more malware-vulnerable. You have to maintain a strong distinction between "things that are on this computer (and maybe even included in Windows)" (safe, one hopes, or you already got pwned by it, probably), and "things on the web" (scary, dangerous, not to be trusted at all).

Eroding that barrier in the UI is awful. It just FEELS like a violation every time I start typing into the start bar, and it tries to show me ANYTHING web-related. My computer is NOT just an internet-portal! It has tons of stuff on it, and when I'm interacting with the OS, I ONLY want to see things that are already on here!

If I wanted to see something online, I would go to my browser! All the online stuff should be segregated into the browser!

Specific programs can access the internet; that's fine. But my OS's functions and interface should JUST be about the things that are already on my computer.

[xtekker]

PSA: this Black Friday you’re gonna see Sandisk Extreme SSDs on huge markdowns. This is because they have hardware defects that cause them to fail frequently. Avoid at any price.

[xtekker]

Seen on a coffee mug

Debugging = being the detective in a crime story where you are also the murderer

[xtekker]

Godot Game Development

So, I've got my brother into game development and we're now working together on Doomscroller. Whats great about this is? well, He doesn't have much coding experience.

None the less, I've been helping him out, guiding him in solving problems and showing him tutorials and videos to help explain Godot 4 but he's mainly been working with and understanding the existing code base.

so, he has claimed the Wizard as his, He wants to create the wizard. I'm skeptical tbh but....

He does now have all animations set up correctly and coded, aswell as movement input code, some minor hickups like using a box collision which was getting the player stuck on slopes.

Pretty proud of him if im honest

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I haven't personally verified this as I'm not at a computer, but multiple people in multiple places are saying the same thing. This is fucking insane. First the endless war on UBlock, then the Chromium changes to shut out some blocker functionalities entirely next year, now this?

Something is deeply rotten in recent Google/YouTube policy. I can't imagine that this is legal - how is this not anticompetitive? Google needs to get mega fucked in the press and the courts sooner rather than later.

And I need to switch to Firefox as soon as I get home.

[xtekker]

If you own it, you should be able to repair it, modify it, and make it better. It's yours.

Fight for your right to repair.

US: Electronic Frontier Foundation, Repair Association Europe: The Restart Project

[xtekker]

Godot Game Development

The Ice Bow

A late night recolour, got bored and thought "lets mess about a little" and after 20mins this is what we have.

I may work on these bows tomorrow. idk yet

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Godot Game Development

Attacking and Shooting

What. a. day.

I tackled the Player attacking and shooting backend today, We have the visual animations already done (Read yesterdays post) but now was time for the backend animation code

Which was

a

HEADACHE.

Problem after problem, "cannot pass Bullet.instantiate on base null value or Cannot get transform of base null" and more.

so I took a break, I went for a walk and worked the problem. How do I think a projectile should work with the knowledge of Godot I have?

and after some tinkering, reading the manual on bringing a node into scene as a child and some more stuff:

Taa'Daa. We have working projectiles that despawn whenever they hit something(I plan to change this behaviour to prevent abuse of mechanics) but this is the first rough draft of the shooting system.

(I wont show attacking as its just the animation with an additional hitbox)

Suggestions for improvement?

[xtekker]

Godot Game Development

Remember this ugly, stroke inducing thing? The animation state machine?

Well, thats gone now, sold it to a very nice midget wearing a strange mask on a small bike and what we have now is:

Which, I feel is alot more understandable, as you notice there are a few new nodes, but the most exciting are "Arrow Types Machine" and "Sword Types Machines", These will eventually contain all Arrow and Sword types I plan to have accessible in-game, much like the State machine your looking at now will work on conditions that the player will fullfill. These will only contain the visual information and condition states with the unlock code held elsewhere. most likely in a "Level Component", we'll see.

I also finished off the animations for this specific player, the animation section of this character is more or less finished, now, we can do this all over again with 2 more characters!

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Doomscroller

I mentioned at the begining of this project my desire to make it somewhat open source and allow people of all ages and abilities to contribute if they so wish.

I have just finished making that a possibility and all relevent files are now on the Github Repo here: Please read the readme

If you'd like to become involved with this project there are many ways you can do that, you can find more information on the Github Repo Readme or on the Discord Server

[xtekker]

Godot Game Development

Well, guys and girls, ladies and gentlemen of all ages, We did it.

We fixed the Animation problem completely.

This is what the characters look like now, minus the AnimatedSprite2D. The animation player holds all the animations and controls their duration and some other stuff and the AnimationTree holds everything else. Including this bad boy:

Which, on first glance looks like a cluster fuck and it does take some deconstructing to understand, here's whats happening here:

Idle is our default begining animation, it plays on load of the player model, from Idle you can do one of the following: Idle > Walking, Running, Jumping and back again so: Walking, Jumping, Running > Idle and this just means the animations will return to the idle state when animation has ended or player has stopped trigging it. From any of the movement animations, you can move to the attack animation, which can also return to one of the animations based on player action, for example, If I went from attacking to walking, the tree would return to walking after the animation for attacking has ended.

and after setting up the conditions for the animations, this is how we tell the state machine what state the player is in

Initally, I did run into a bug with the if velocity statement triggering conditions when attacking/hurt/dying and thats because at that point they have no velocity so that idle statement is true, I solved this by creating an is_animated variable, which (edit at 2am now I've thought a about it some more: Turns out to be a waste of time, it worked as intended that isnt the issue but i could of used input is action released and got the same result.)

I honestly had a blast doing this, it was challenging, there were issues that needed a solution and I still accomplished what I set out to do.

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Promised myself I'd fix it yesterday and for the most part, I achieved what I set out to do.

What we have now is a set of 3 animation components, which can used on other character models and future expansions. We have an animation player, which holds all the animations and manages their playback, an animation tree, which links with the player and a state machine, which will control when the player plays x animation, what state the animation and player is in, whereby the player is either moving, running, jumping, attacking etc or not.

It works! Problem solved! A brief test last night showed that the solution does work as intended, some minor fine tweaks are needed to some animations run duration. Like change the walk animation duration from 0.785 to 0.783 and I need to code the rest of the animation conditions but IT WORKS!!!

Godot Game Development

Okay, so yesterday I mentioned about the animations rubber banding, when I investigated further and slowed all the animations, I could see that the issues laid with the run, jump and attack animations. Originally, I thought it may be a timing issue, the frames/animations aren't playing for long enough 🤔, could it be that simple? When is it ever that simple.

Long story short, I made a fundamental oversight when I started Doomscroller. I used an animated sprite, which is fine for Mobs and single animations but not so great with a player model who uses multiple animations triggered by multiple inputs. The issue specifically was when the player is running, its also registering it as a left or right press, which also triggers the walk animation, thus meaning the run animation and walk animations play at the same time but at different speeds. Leading to the illusion of it rubber banding.

So, what's the solution? Well, I'm going to redo it but properly, as there are around 10 total animations, I think the best solution for this is an animation player and state machine to seamlessly handle animation state, transition and control.

So let's do that

[xtekker]

Godot Game Development

Okay, so yesterday I mentioned about the animations rubber banding, when I investigated further and slowed all the animations, I could see that the issues laid with the run, jump and attack animations. Originally, I thought it may be a timing issue, the frames/animations aren't playing for long enough 🤔, could it be that simple? When is it ever that simple.

Long story short, I made a fundamental oversight when I started Doomscroller. I used an animated sprite, which is fine for Mobs and single animations but not so great with a player model who uses multiple animations triggered by multiple inputs. The issue specifically was when the player is running, its also registering it as a left or right press, which also triggers the walk animation, thus meaning the run animation and walk animations play at the same time but at different speeds. Leading to the illusion of it rubber banding.

So, what's the solution? Well, I'm going to redo it but properly, as there are around 10 total animations, I think the best solution for this is an animation player and state machine to seamlessly handle animation state, transition and control.

So let's do that

[xtekker]

Godot Game Development

I mentioned last night about tidying up the scrolling and general map look and this is the progress at lunch.

So far, I've tweeked the scroll speed of the layers to give it a more dynamic feel, moved the layers down slightly to give a distance feel and fixed the map layer rendering issue, so now all map and tile layers correctly show up.

Next, I'll be moving on to fix the animations which I feel like will require a new system to handle which animation is selected as there are multiple for each action.

Edit: I didn't know it would also record my music lol

[xtekker]

Godot Game Development

Parallax Backgrounds and layers

Okay, so I had an idea, something I had seen in a few other platformer games, as a way to add a sense of depth, speed and character to a map, long story short you create layers that scroll at different speeds as the player moves. I tried it. A few ti..many times...but I got there in the end!

What we have now is a static background image for the sky, some quickly drawn-in-mspaint hills and mountains and some quickly slapped in grass(its actually the background layer of a forest👍)that both scroll.

Tomorrow, I plan to tidy this up and fix the problems with the sprites animation sequences. They have a weird issue whereby the frames are rubber banding. More on that tomorrow.