Starting a new prototype

#game-dev #personal

True to my work, I have started work on a new game!

My week of dev

So this blog is a little bit later than what I wanted, but sometimes life happens, and you sort out the fun stuff later.

I started work on my new game on Last Friday, firing up my Godot Editor, and added some simple multiplayer. I say 'added' like it was easy, but it took a little bit of wrangling to fix my own shortcuts that exploded the engine.

It turns out, if you follow the documentation properly, it works.

But all in all, valuable learning experience. Especially where you can, and cannot, take shortcuts. By Tuesday, I had local multiplayer connections working, and I could see my character move around.

Then I began work on the actual meat of the game. I want to have a melee system with fine control over the angle of attack. To begin with, I thought of using actual physics objects for the sword, so it could bounce off armour using the physics system. I then proceeded to lose half a night wondering why the 6DOF spring joint wasn't working no matter how high I cranked the numbers.

It turns out, GodotPhysics has not implemented springs in their joints.

A quick switch to JoltPhysics, and my sword sprang to life!
But it was not meant to be.

Using physics joints for swords, means I needed to have another physics object for the hand. And once I started moving these around, the sword was getting stuck in the floor, dragging around, I could never get it to stay straight, etc etc etc.

I could tell pretty quick that this was probably a dead end. So I'll have to code the movement manually.

And on Tuesday, I got the first step of my attack done.

Attacking

So the way it works, is when the attack is held, movement translates to hand position. Moving left, moves your hand left, which will make a left to right slice. The idea is, by mixing horizontal and vertical movement, you could change the angle of attack to precisely avoid armour.

I got the first step, moving the hands based on your movement, finished.

Then I crashed. For the rest of the week.

Why?

Well, full time work + parenting + hobby is hard work, and I probably pushed myself a little too hard, too fast. This prototype, and the game I hope to make out of it, is a marathon, and not a sprint. So I'll need to find a rhythm that works for me. And I'll use this blog to keep my honest.

But, it's a new week now, so I'll be back at it on Monday, and I'll have the next write-up done on Friday!

See you then!