sticks and starts

I’ve been quite busy and progress has been slow. I started by trying to follow some tutorials on YouTube but quickly remembered that I don’t like them, it feels like everyone and their mothers are making them. So, I read about Godot a little, used its documentation and some written tutorials to understand what was going on, and created a shameful platformer as my first project. Then I eventually I started this one.

The first things I created in this project was a moveable player, a shrinking fire, a throwable stick, and a procedurally generating background, all tied together with some quickly churned out sprites.

This clip demonstrates the player moving and picking up and throwing sticks, the fire growing and shrinking, and the procedural generation of the background. The throwing is done by simulating the position of the stick in 3D using a vertical velocity and gravity, and offsetting the 2D position of the stick by its simulated 3D height, as well as giving the stick a random rotation. To make the fire change size, I gave it a sort of health value that decrements over time and I just adjust the scale of its sprite to show this.

The animations of the stick rotating and the fire changing size looks a little janky is not just because I reduced the frame rate of the gif but also because the size of the game is limited to 256x144 pixels and the camera is too, so it moves pixel by pixel. I don’t think I want the camera to move pixel by pixel but I couldn’t figure out a way to change it in the few minutes I tried. A future problem to solve.

Some of the next steps are making a much better item and inventory system, currently there is one Stick node and the player just has a stick_count I increment and decrement, so it clearly needs work. I also want to expand upon and improve the procedural generation, currently I use one layer of Godot’s FastNoiseLite to decide what tile to display with basic chunk loading, I’d like this to have multiple layers as well as a better chunk system. I’m not that worried about the art right now but it does clearly need work.