The earliest Gameplay Footage ever...

It's still very very early on in the prototyping stage with not a whole lot of meat on the bone to show, however it's good to see where it all starts!

Currently the main focus is on the Player Controller, and how the player movement works. It is being setup with with future planning in mind, so that way integrating things like ability systems etc will fit in well with the current structure. It started out very basic with everything being housed in the player.gd script to get things going. After getting a feel for it all, this got migrated into a FSM (Finite State Machine) The advantage of using this system is that it allows each state to have complete autonomy, without having to know what happens or the purpose of any other state. This allows you to block out code in a more concise manner and keep things simple. I also expose the states have @export variables for other states, to allow them to have fallback states or handle transitions more specifically. The current states at this stage of development are the most basic.

I have Idle, Move, Sprint and Dash. Currently Sprint and Dash control their own 'Energy/Stamina' values, however when we work on our Stat System, these will get migrated to that and most likely be a share resource between the two states.

At present I'm using some free character sprites from itch.io in the 8-Directional template which I plan to use for the project. These are just placeholder and don't really represent the look-and-feel of the game as my intention isn't really to be that Nintendo'esque bright and bubbly. But they'll have to do for now. I've gone back and forth a lot about how I will design the character templates, 8-Directional Movement is a guarantee, but the graphical representation is hard to choose. Do you doe a 4-Directional with only 2 Unique Graphics? This is common in many games, you will basically have your North-East and South-East graphics that then get flipped and are used for all movement directions. They're the most simple and have the least amount of asset creation required, this is always a bonus for a solo dev, but also can reduce how immersive it feels. This then of course can expand to 4-Directional with 3 Unique Graphics, this kinda falls under the same umbrella but changes the feel completely, as it gives your your traditional cardinal directions of North, East, South, West and angled movement gets locked on the East-West. Then finally, you can do the full 8-Directional animation, this however requires now 5 Unique Graphics for North, North-East, East, South-East and South, with your angles being flipped. This gives the best overall felling, and its pretty crucial if you planned to do isometric work (I do not) but it can also significant't increase your asset creation responsibilities. Something to ponder further. I think the best approach I could do for now is do the 4-Directional with only 2 Unique, and then if I choose to go the full 8-Directional animation route later it is perfectly feasible with very little code changing to handle the animation switching.

Until next time, I'll keep shouting into the void!