Sept 2023 Update

After posting the last update I noticed a bug in the walk-idle animation cycle. The MC would transition to a facing south pose for the clothing layer. It took me 2 or 3 days to trying to hunt down the problem. I guess something went wrong when I swapped out the old frames for the walk cycle. Deleting and remaking the animation strips in the animSprite node solved the problem.

With that problem solved I moved on to implementing mechanics to damage an enemy (could be used to damage objects too). It took me a while to find a solution as in my last project I only had to worry about bullets, but this game will primarily be a melee combat game with wide sweeping motions as apposed to just one single point of impact.

I didn’t want to use colliders as I’ve learned from experience they are hit and miss when it comes to hit detection. If you only want the hit frame to last a fraction of a second, you will likely clip through the collider half the time. So I went with raycast. Raycast have their own issues, but they are super reliable when it comes to hit detection. I’ll have to test what I made a bit more, but I think this solution will work.

Combos have been added as well. I’m still wrapping my head around how I want the combat mechanics to work. I’m thinking of a combination between combos and charged attacks. I’ll get back to that later as I’ve already put a lot on my plate for the next release.

After that I started prototyping the layouts for the wheel menu. As I was working on this I decided to scrap my idea to have the options amalgamated into the wheel ‘action’ menu, so I started working on a sort of ‘control/pause’ menu separate from the wheel. I made a quick prototype but the next day decided to scrap what I did in favor of a more permanent solution. I used my already modeled and rigged hand to make a sprite for a cursor and used a nicer font than the default Godot one to make a series of labels and an animation node to add a bit of life to the menu.

The menu will have the typical Resume/Options/Return to title etc, and will be accessible by using the ‘H’ key or the ‘pause’ button on a gamepad. I’ll add the options later, but for now I’ll give the player the ability to exit the game or return to the main menu via this menu.

Since my plan was to have resource gathering for the next release I realized that I was going to have to provide a place for the player to store these resources. So even though I didn’t intend to include the inventory in the next build, I’m kind of forced to. Regardless, I have to make the inventory at some point, so it may as well be earlier than planed. This will add more days/weeks of development, but it can’t really be helped.

Now that the inventory has been brought back into the picture, the player will have to be able to access it, so I went back to the wheel menu. I hadn't really planned anything for the menu other than being able to access the inventory, so I took some time to decide what I would want to add to this menu. Along with the inventory access I’ll be adding the following:

(Please note that this mostly me brainstorming, I may remove or even add stuff as I go along. Some ideas sound great.... Until you ‘put them on paper’.)

-Spell book: The magic system in this game will likely be OP, spells will cost a lot of magic or the player will have limited ways to refiling the magic gauge, but spell effects will be profound. I plan to have a separate hotbar for magic that will be set via the spell book. I’m starting to run out of buttons on the controller, so this is forcing me to design around these limitations. I’ll elaborate more on the magic system when I get to scripting it. But I think the solution I have in mind will be palatable by most players.

-Status: Self explanatory. Players will be able to check skill levels, experience, money held etc.

-Journal: I plan to have some goals in this game, and they will be listed in the journal.

-Encyclopedia: Because of memory limitations the player probably won’t be able to keep every kind of monster girl. Therefore I plan to use the encyclopedia as a way for the player to have a sense of completion before having to release a monster girl. The player will be tasked with filling out the encyclopedia by trying various things like feeding different kinds of food to a monster girl. Other things like items and resources will be entered into the encyclopedia as the player acquires or crafts the various items in the game.

Mostly programming and configuring nodes this month. I’m hoping to finish up most of the inventory programming sometime next month and then work on some art assets as I really want to get rid of the placeholder icons.

So it seems that my decision to leave Unity (game engine) for Godot was a smart one. Mid month Unity announced that they would be charging developers for each and every install of their game regardless of pricing or whether the game was acquired through proper commercial channels.

Not that I plan on releasing a commercial release anytime soon, it’s still nice not having to worry about that.

R.I.P. all the good faith that people have put into Unity.

I’m too lazy to do a ‘how I did that’ right now, so maybe next time.

Anyway that’s all for this month’s progress report. I’ll drop a line again at the end of/or close to October (assuming nothing horrible happens).