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Gamedev - Blog Posts
Box
You can lift it, and you can smack it. Maybe I should put more velocity into the smack.
Battle Transition
So I was really happy with this. Then, I spent some time on other stuff. And when I came back, I found one of my shaders was broken... So the current version is a tiny bit different.
Battle Parallax
making this background was kinda hard. I think it turned out alright.
Dialogue Box
Holy shi* the frames on this recording. Anyway, here is my dialogue box! it reads a JSON file with all the lines a dialogue has and plays them with a silly sound that I might change... It has support for some cool stuff although it's not implemented yet since I'm really lazy and suck at writing.
Don't mind the other things in the background... However, if you can't control your curiosity, listen closely. I heard there is a hidden archive on a particular discord server full of other development snippets, including snippets that haven't been posted here!? If anyone asks you didn't hear it from me (plz join, k thx bye)
Liftable Objects
Super quick and basic implementation that just tells the object to follow the player's position with a bit of an offset. I use a ray cast to check if there are colliders where the drop area is and change the drop location to behind the player if that is the case... It uh sometimes crushes you or your party members but that's no biggie, right? It also sometimes gets glitched into things but that's an edge case that won't be abused at all.
You know... looking at it now, it might be a little buggy... But it's fun and brings a bit more interactivity to the overworld/field so I'm happy it's implemented haha.
Wonky Battle Scene Camera
Math is really important in game development. I'm trying to organize my battle scene similarly to how it's done in a PSP game known as Grand Knights History. My version is a bit rough, to say the least... Is it just me or does it feel like the UI on the bottom is sticky?
Water Shader
Shaders are literal witchcraft, although getting this one to work was a bit of a hassle since a lot don't play well with an orthographic camera. Don't mind the jesus tech, It get's patched out later.
Battle Scene
Since I had to rewrite everything while porting to Godot 4, I decided to make some tweaks to the battle scene. The UI changed a bit but float text is mostly the same...
New Chests!
Compared to the 2D ones getting this 3D one up to snuff was a bit of work. I still need to retexture the inside of the top half and add some glow effects maybe. I'm slowly getting a hang of blender and 3D workflows but I don't think I'm ready to do a house just yet... Maybe I should make some variants... I kinda want to make a minecrafty one that's super cuby.
As for why I decided to model a chest instead of billboarding one like the trees... So you can stand on it! I have some level design ideas in mind where a chest or some other small object is required to reach locations but for now, it's still just an idea.
More Terrain Stuff
More models I ended up scrapping. 3D modelling is very tuff.
Terrain Stuff
I had to model this... with a blender! ridiculous.
Level Transition
It's really fast but it might be due to how empty these testing levels are and not how well I coded it lol. I sorta want to edit the shader I'm using to do a radial wipe but glsl is the enemy of mankind.
Party Follow
So following party members are a bit tricker in 3D. The main issue I need to solve is how they handle being obstructed by something they can scale. I sorta want to put jumping into their state machine but I'm lazy so for now they teleport. I had a slight issue where when they teleported somewhere they could crush the player controller into the ground... it might still be an issue I need to test it more haha.
If you were curious about how their path-finding works it's something like this:
A. Determine the vector between the current position and the player position ignoring the y-axis. B. Add vector to velocity to move in the player's direction. C. If one of 6 ray casts reports collision and velocity is close to zero pick another direction to walk in for a while before resuming from step A.
I could use the built-in navigation stuff Godot has but it needs to be baked and I sorta want to avoid that with how much I like to tweak the environment sometimes. Idk it works well enough for now but there is totally room for improvement haha.
Psuedo2D
A dump of some things. I briefly mentioned how I had rewrote the game in Godot 4. During the transition I decided to give up on pure 2D and just make a 3D game that looks 2D... so in my own words, pearlessential is now a Psuedo2D game. Here are some captures from early in the transition.
An attempt at VFX
This took a lot of time to make and I'm pretty sure I'm gonna scrap it. It's pretty cool tho, it's entirely 2D (part of why it took so long to make...)
Equip/Augment UI Mockup
Probably my favourite mockup to date. This is where the player will configure their party members. A battler can equip 1 weapon, 1 armor set, 1-2 artifacts depending on class and 4 techniques. This amounts to 8 possible things to customize around the endgame. On top of the equipment possibilities, the player can also augment 4 attributes (SPD, STR, DEF, MAG) on each of their characters using attribute points scattered across the world.
Results Screen (In engine!)
This was like the last thing I added before terrain bugged me out so much that I decided rewriting the entire codebase and switching to 3D would be more enjoyable than trying to get it to work
Terrain
So walking around a flat world is fine, but my game is isometric so having terrain feels like a must. too bad it's a pain in the ass to implement. I spent months on this and in the end, it wasn't good enough. It wouldn't play well with other props like trees well, The player could glitch it out and clip through it, render order and collision was abhorrent and it couldn't stack on top of itself. I'll be honest the whole reason for why I switched to 3D in the Godot 4 version of the game is because a fake z axis in 2D isn't very fun to implement.
Some of the collision shapes I had to setup
I drew them out so I could turn them into tiles for the tileset
Anyway, word of advice to anyone who wants to make an isometric game, make a 3D game that looks 2D not the other way around.
Super annoying lag bug
So this is a bug I've had for awhile, and thanks to level switching, I know it's sorta localized to scenes. But it has nothing to do with scene contents. I ended up porting the game without figuring out why it happened, I'm trying really hard to keep my code clean to avoid replicating it again lol.
Inventory UI
I did get to implementing it before porting the game over, but I realized the box to the right of the list could probably look a bit better, so it needs some tweaks. As I mentioned earlier I decided to port the game to Godot 4 which I thought would be fine since the project is mostly art and not much code. But then Godot failed to convert the old project. I still believed it would be fine since there was only a handful of features in the game anyway and it wouldn't take too long to rewrite them from scratch. Plus I could just look at my old code. Then I started the rewrite and... rewriting code is really boring
Super Fancy Location Indicator
That I will probably redesign since I want to redesign the pause menu...
Level Switching
Super important feature since I can't put the whole game in one scene without gigabrain code turning things off and on as needed. It also lets me teleport the player within a scene which is nice
Level Switching Bug
I figured it out eventually but this was too funny not to share
Tower
Doing the bricks on the bottom was heck. I guess this is a good time to tell you this specific one won't be in the game... not because it's bad or anything but because while porting to Godot 4 I switched to 3D. So now I have to model the bricks on the bottom... heck. At least you'll be able to jump from rooftops to rooftops... hopefully
Inventory UI Part 2
So uh scroll bars and the scroll container node suck. I just kinda hate them. This is probably the first time I got them to work the way I wanted lol. I also got it to do this which I think was pretty cool:
Inventory UI
Slowly putting it together... It's just undergoing a few hiccups, totally not bugs arising from my janky programming skills
Dialogue Choice
This was super cool to implement, but now I'm having trouble designing dialogue trees and other narrative stuff. Writing is hard