esther

I’m officially done! I’ve updated the README.md with more sources, exported the game and reverted the score increment back to one, and uploaded it to itch.io!!!

I added the story mode completions level to the death screen. I was also trying to fix some type of bug that I think was because of the engine but I couldn’t manage to fix it, so I just adjusted the camera position. I also changed the text of the countdown.

I’m nearly finished with the game! I finished the game ending screen for the story mode and also added a cheering sound effect. I also found out the solution to an issue I’ve been having with Godot games (accidently). I noticed that a lot of the textures for tiles, characters, and other assets were blurry in the game. I thought the issue was caused by scaling the assets and maybe there was an issue with the assets themselves.

However, I looked at another person’s game who used the same character asset as I did, and noticed how clean and unblurry the asset looked in their game. I went to the inspector for the player node, and noticed the texture section. Changing the filter to nearest insted of inherited made the player character’s sprite look SO much better.

I created a little animation for when a player completes story mode! Mittens is so cute :DDDDDDD

I also created a game mode selection screen and updated the code to go to the animation when the player completes story mode.

I finished the home screen! I added all of the option and how to play panels and buttons and coded the buttons to open and close the panels.

I created the options panel. The only option players would have is to toggle the music on and off. I tried really hard to think about other options but like… there’s nothing else in my game that can be toggled.

I finally created the enter scene! The only button that has functionality right now is the player button. Later I will add popup menus for the how-to-play and options buttons. This is going to be the first game I’ve created with an options functionality. I also added more fonts and adjusted the death screen ui.

I couldn’t make a devlog earlier because my Hackatime wasn’t working for some reason.
I finally downloaded some fonts for the game and added a score label as well. I think I also worked on making the code more easy to read and added more comments or clarifications to code. I also added some variables for endless and story mode score variables and labels on the death screen.

Then, I decided to actually implement high score tracking and seeing the score for each run at the end of a run. I coded some logic to change the high score if the score gained in the run is higher than the previous score, added some extra labels, reorganized the layering of nodes to make the death screen on top, and learned about custom signals!!

I used a custom signal that emits when the player dies instead of determining that the player has died because the scene has been paused. I want to eventually implement a pause feature into the game so I wanted the code for detecting death to be a bit more specific and less broad. I used the signal to run a function that deals with the high score logic and then pauses the tree and shows the death screen.

Well, it turns out that Godot has a feature where you can create parallax backgrounds, so all my effort was (kinda) for nothing. But, at least I finally created a moving background, which looks beautiful :3. I had to readjust the whole background scene which took longer than I thought it would (screw individual parallax nodes). I’m really close to finishing the game, I just have to polish U.I, add fonts, add some more ui scenes and maybe implement a way to create different game modes (endless and story mode).

I changed A LOT of stuff. I’m in the process of trying to create a parallax background, which has forced me to restructure some of my code (mainly through adding nodes to groups and referencing the last node in that group instead of referencing the last node in the tree). I’m trying to test adding a continuing (parallax) background to the game, which forced me to look at documentation and forums (again, unfortunately :( ).

I finally got a texture for the platforms from an itch.io user (will be credited in the readme when I finish the project). I also changed the score increment back to 1 point every entrance, adjusted the speeds for score milestones, and also changed which scores the speed of the camera and the player would change. I also made it so the the player is ever so slightly faster than the camera to make it a bit more challenging. I also hid the score counter until the countdown’s finished,

I wrote some code to make the “background” move the same speed as the camera. This is going to be like a “base” code for creating the actual background in the future. Eventually, I want to add a background that includes different moving layers, of which their speeds reference the camera speed to determine how slow or fast they go.

I worked on creating a countdown screen to get the game ready before the player can start playing. I used an animation player to get this result, but was originally trying to use a script to change the text for the countdown. I’ve also divided some of the code that will run on the main scene getting ready to make it easier to read.

I made music for the game and added the font for ui in the game. I tried to change the code for deleting the platforms a bit by using a timer in the tree, but after trying for a while, I realized it didn’t work well. It was better to just create a timer within the code instead of having a second timer in the tree.

I noticed that when I reached a certain amount of playtime, the game would slow down a lot and lag. I realized it was because I added a lot of the platforms too quickly and also didn’t end up removing them from the tree when they’re no longer in use. So, I worked on removing old platforms once the edge of the camera goes past them, and also made it so that the length intervals between adding new platforms increases depending on how many instances are in the tree.

I finally added the score counter to the game to track each time the player jumps over a platform. I also made it so that the game speeds up when the player reaches a certain score. Also created a globals/autoload scene.

Created a resource for adjusting the speeds of the camera and player + the timer wait time, since I thought resources were cool and wanted to try them out in Godot. I also added a global scene to finally add the score as well. I also deleted unnecessary nodes I used for trying out the mechanisms for this game, limited jumps to only 2 jumps, and wrote comments to explain purposes for code and also statically typed certain variables.

I worked on the platform height and distance generation a bit to fix new instances from meshing into other instances of the platforms. Also figured out how to add points only once since players can move back and forth between platforms (points are basically added on first entrance) w/ debugging statements.

Yay! I finally got the platform position generation to work. I realized that in the game I got inspiration from, the camera moves and not the actual platforms. So I tried to figure out how to make the platform distance and height be random. I almost thought I had it since I was using code from my flappy game to randomize height between instances of obstacles, buttttt i had to reference the last added instance to also make the new instances have a reasonable distance between the old and new instance. I did manage to figure it out through looking through docs and indexing the last added child in the scene tree. Took me less time than it usually would

Worked on getting the character animations right and messed around with the platform movement a bit; might make it so that the camera moves and not the platforms soon, though.

I’m working on my first project! This is so exciting. I can’t wait to share more updates as I build.