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My apologies for the lack of updates lately! Between being hard at work on the game's progress, lacking motivation, and university exams, I really didn't have the time to write a proper update. Instead, I figured it would now be a great time to do a bundled progress update, since I really did get a lot done that takes the game quite a few steps further!

The most apparent change may be the new character! It's a temporary character once again – character number 3, to be exact – but this time it's rigged properly. There are no bends in the character, which sounds PS1-esque but is actually on purpose because the final character is supposed to be a robot.

There are also new animations! Nothing finished, of course, but I created them to play around with Godot's AnimationTree and Blend2D, which worked very well to lay out and play even multiple animations at once. There are now animations for walking, standing still, pointing a gun, single jumping, and double jumping! What's missing is a falling animations, but that will be implemented once I figure out how to import NLA tracks instead of needing to re-import the entire character for every animation change.

The game also now has a proper sky! I used this Procedural Sky with Procedural Sun and Moon shader by krzmig and tweaked the colours and light to get the current look. I don't expect this to be final necessarily, but I'll definitely at the very least use this as a base. I do like the look though, so it might remain final after all!

I fixed the glowing issues in the game at one point, but then screwed up again because glow wasn't working at all anymore. Only after over an hour of troubleshooting did I realise that I disabled glow in the WorldEnvironment node...

In tweaking the WorldEnvironment, I even got shadows to work!

That red thing in the top right is an enemy. It doesn't move yet, and it can't take damage either (thus making it invulnerable), but it can be targetted, and it can damage the player too!

It can be targetted? Yes! There's now an AutoAimAgent component available for all weapons that targets the nearest enemy that's inside a collision cone attached to the weapon. Once an enemy is inside this collision zone, a target is shown to let the player know which enemy is targetted, and the weapon fires in the precise direction of the enemy.

The weapons received more updates! There's now a quick change function that allows for quickly switching between the 3 most recently used weapons by pressing the Quick Select button quickly.

That sperm rocket you're seeing in the picture above is the new rocket launcher. I wanted to implement the rocket launcher as a weapon type already, so I quickly whipped by a temporary model for launcher and rockets, and implemented the functionality. And it works! It even has particle effects for the rockets!

overcompensation be like

I really feared GPU particles because I figured they would be insanely difficult to implement, but Godot really made this a breeze. Now, making them look good is a different story, but that's more so due to my lacking creativity and skill.

What you don't possess, you can buy. And what do you need to buy those things? Money.

Aside from increasing a counter upon being collected, these totally-not-bolts don't do anything at the moment. But it's a start! In the future, the money can be used to buy things at the vendor that also already exists! But interacting with it only yields a blank menu at the moment.

There's more that I can't really show visually though. I made huge progress with the character, for instance. Or rather, I fixed some of the issues my own script caused. I used to use a custom solution based on someone else's code to handle movement speed and sliding on slopes, but this introduced two massive issues. For one, stepping onto a steep slope while still half-standing on a surface that can be walked on caused the character to lose the ability to move until jumping, thus getting stuck. The other issue was that some abrupt slope angle changes caused the entire game to crash, probably caused by a faulty RayCast check.

Now, how did I fix these issues? Well, I found out that Godot already offers these functions in the default CharacterController3D. Hence, I ripped out all the custom code, I essentially checked two boolean flags, and I had the same behaviour, minus the game-breaking bugs. Despite my stupidity, I felt very happy to have discovered that. My player script is now a lot cleaner!

And so are other scripts! I cleaned up a few scripts, most recently the Inventory script. There used to be a lot of redundant function calls that essentially did the same thing except with one check that could be performed more centrally. I also double-checked item IDs unnecessarily. All gone now! Inventory is much more streamlined now.

My next goals are to implement enemy health as well as a level travelling mechanic. To be able to test weapons, enemy movement, and balancing, I want to add an arena world with test challenges. Adding an arena is convenient anyways, since I aim to have an arena in the final game anyway, so I can feel free to dedicate more resources into the arena than if it only were for testing.

Let's see how long it'll take me to get these things done! I really do love working on my game, but I often lack the motivation to start working on it. Once I'm in the flow, I can get a lot done, but getting into that flow, just getting out of bed to start something that can be considered "work" – that's the difficult part.