Feb 2025 Devlog

A major milestone complete!

This month, while short, was long regarding what got done.

To start the month off, I cleaned up some bugs I had found at the end of the last sprint, including some collisions being off and some adjustments to the pickups.

I then proceeded to make my water look like water. This was not an easy task, and I learned that if I had retained any algebra from 9th grade, it would have been helpful, as creating shaders relies heavily on that kind of math. ChatGPT helped guide me along the way, particularly when I told it to treat me like I was five. While the AI was useful, it was not as valuable as watching this video, replicating it in my game, and making a whole bunch of adjustments to the formulas to perfect the look I was aiming for. Finally, after about a week of playing with the shader, I got the water how I wanted it to be, and honestly, I felt like a magician when I was done.

I then started working on putting mountains in the background, but that turned into yet another fight with the parallax2d node. I swear when I make my next game, I will avoid the need to fake parallax motion because otherwise, it will be the end of me.

First, I learned that Godot tutorials, aka Godot documentation. This was not the case in my world, but it is here. I also learned that when designing the parallax node, no one thought about adding items further into the distance that are not all repeating starting from (0,0). Yes, there is a plugin (thank you, kind Reddit people); however, it doesn’t help when the offset eventually makes the item disappear because you can ONLY place items at the (0,0) mark. The best I can do with the parallax is to have my background repeat and move slower. Ok, rant over.

After deciding to go a different route rather than having mountains in the background, I ended up with the idea of floating islands for the tiles that were not attached to the ground. This also gave me a way to have a grounded cave entrance that was not physically attached to the ground. As a result of that change, and the water now making all of my tiles look meh, I decided to tackle the tiles next. This was where the rest of the month went to. After many days of trying to google how to make tiles for a 2d non-pixel game and driving myself mad because I was on the struggle bus getting my tiles to line up nicely, I called up my cousin, who does art for a living. She helped me understand a plan/pattern to follow to get the tiles to align and have a pattern in them.

Finally, after the tiles, floating islands, and cave entrance were completed, it was time to achieve my significant milestone—giving my group of peeps to try Level 1. Without giving away the plot, the psychology I use in the game seems to work better than expected. A few adjustments/suggestions have been made that I will consider implementing in the future, but so far, I am taking the reactions as a win.