Hello, I haven’t been doing much on Flowlab recently. This is because I’ve been working on a game with my friends in a game engine called Godot for a competition, called OGPC. (This is in Oregon, for middle schoolers and high schoolers to compete in.)
The theme was “Cycles”.
I’ll be posting updates on Dunebound every week, if I have time, up to May 18th, which is when the competition deadline is.
First, a bit about the game. It is a survival, open world game where you play as a character traversing vast dunes, and fighting creatures and collecting specimens and ancient artifacts of civilizations that perished, looking for clues of a civilization that will be your home.
2/18
Not many changes. Added a prototype background, another dune sprite, as well as partially coded time. Day / night system adds a gradient over the entire game. It looks pretty good, but I gotta make the equation follow what the in-game time actually is. It’s a bit tricky, I can’t figure it out.
2/22
I made an attack animation for the player, it can now attack things
It’s a good start, I will need a couple more though, and for different weapons.
Yes, we are planning on making this game mostly around the time.
During the day it will be super hot, and during the night it will be super cold, making you change playstyles (hopefully)
Also, there will be cyclic weather formations, such as the monthly sandstorm, which you will need to have gathered enough food, and have found shelter to survive through. We are also planning to add flash flooding
Furthermore, (if we have time for this, this is kinda optional) the types of enemies that will be spawned will be based on the current temperature.
oh yeah… I didn’t mention that this is a team project.
Just a couple of my friends on my team
Two other programmers
One artist
Although most of the things that you’ve seen so far are all me. (I’m getting better at animation!)
Here is our github project, it’s really unorganized, but I’m just beginning to learn how to use github.
Anyone who knows how to use it pls share advice. We have been encountering many merge conflicts, especially in Main.tscn, which is autogenerated code and it’s really annoying to fix.
You can take damage now, from the enemy that walks back and forth, and also a new enemy that chases you.
lol
There’s also the food prototype, which is the godot logo in the first screenshot. You can push it around, and you can set the push force that the player can exert on it. It is kinda funky, and if you set the push force negative, it will fly into you and boost you really far away. Sometimes it also glitches into the ground, if the force is high.
Most of the effort this week was really spent on getting our code cleaner. Working with 3 other people is hard.
We had to switch from the enemies calling .damage() on the player to doing it all in the player. I did this by making two arrays of the bodies in the hitbox, and the areas in the hitbox, and checking a dictionary (new data type I learned about!) with the enemy name, and the damage it does.
3/13
Back again with some more player animations…
This one is pretty much complete except for the cape.
This slide animation isn’t finished at all lol, just the outline.
I also made an animation for the move back/forth enemy.
The legs are kinda funny, but it was the best I could do with 3 pixels.
( I cant change image size in the html here)
I also remade the attack system, now it has all four directions added. The controls are like this; ad for movement, and also changes the direction you attack, ws for looking up and down for attacking, and spacebar for jump. Click for attack. It kinda feels weird because where you click doesn’t matter, but it is pretty fluent otherwise.
There is also a sliding mechanic being made by my friend, where you do a quick burst of speed, but then you start gaining speed / losing speed based on the angle of the ground. Right now it doesn’t feel very fluent.
I also set up tilemaps in Godot because I quickly realized that making individual textures for each dune and area was not going to work. Our artist is working on making more tiles.
At first I thought it was going to be really, really slow to make different slopes with the tilemap, until I found out that they have a patterns section of the tilemap node, that lets you save arrangements of blocks and place them all down at the same time. This will definitely speed up the process.
Xavier, our programmer has made sliding much more functional and smooth now, although it still is a bit janky and we’ll probably still have to fix it up / change how it works later.
I helped Oscar update the Tilemap a bit, with more blocks and slopes, and spikes. The game looks so much better with just a bit of tilemap and world building!
Along with tilemap stuff, I made a tilemap detection system that tells you exactly what blocks are in your hurtbox, which is useful for the spikes, that now kill you. This was actually very tricky to do.
I also believe that the buggy animation was also added into the game.
A pillar I made, it doesn’t look very good in-game. Any ideas on how to improve it?
3/25
Goofy sliding again
I believe it is finally done, works pretty well.
Also finally finished the animation and the tilting… The sprite changes angle based on the floor angle.
Maybe make the visuals small like in sup3r’s games, and maybe make them like a bar that loops around the object. Its simple and easy to interpret and doesn’t take much space.
For the heat and cold, you could make it like to much movement can make you hot in the day, so stopping can make you cool down, the opposite for the night.
Well, since your game is situated in the desert, you could make it that when you move too much or play for a while you get hot, and the only way to cool down is to either wait for the night, or drink some water, and you only get a small amount of water per whatever. So the player has to consider when to drink or if they should change their playstyle.
I cant change image size in the html here)
