• Got back to work on Black Mountain
  • Imported all of the maps I’d drawn but not gotten into the game yet
  • Fixed up some stuff I just hadn’t finished
  • Some code refactoring
  • Started drawing another cave

I had a week off so I got quite a lot done this week, and it wasn’t JUST playing Heretic.

Importing Maps

I had a big backlog of maps that were drawn but weren’t functional in the game yet. I sat down and got those all in. It’s semi-rewarding to do but still just kind of monotonous. You can now (I think) walk from the beginning of the game to the end! There’s no story in there yet though, just the maps, and some of the bits which are going to be light puzzles just let you walk through instead.

A Second Look

It also let me see that I just kind of… had stopped halfway through some of the maps. It also let me take another look at the flow of the maps – I’ve corrected one pretty layout issue and have some thoughts about fixing some others. I’m not super proficient at map design, so it’s something I’m trying to keep an eye out for. It also gave me the opportunity to try out the flow of re-organizing a map in this “drafting” format. It’s… okay. It’s certainly not as easy as changing around a traditional tile map. I don’t think I’ll change my mind about how I’m building the maps for this game, but it’s interesting to see what works well and what doesn’t.

I also came up with some ideas for how to make building the levels a little less onerous. I’ll talk about that more when/if I get around to doing it.

Code Refactoring

I’m trying to apply bits and pieces of what I learned from making six games in the last month to clean up some of the code. All things considered, I’m still relatively new at using Godot, and still firmly in that awkward phase where it takes way longer to make anything (big) than it takes to get better enough that you develop a pretty hardcore disdain for the code.

Happily (?) I intend to leverage this code for other games so it’s worth spending some time cleaning it up. The biggest thing I did was just small housekeeping things.

  • I was inheriting from Node for a lot of helper objects that should have just inherited from Object. If it doesn’t need to go in the scene tree, it doesn’t need to inherit from Node.
  • I was registering a lot of things as custom types unnecessarily, with the primary goal of being able to refer to them by class name. You can just use class_name for that – class_name Foo will make Foo available globally as a reference to that class.

I’d like to take a crack at making my movement system better, maybe. First I need to figure out whether I had a good reason for some of the decisions that I don’t like now. I also want to try to iron out some wrinkles in some of my basic map primitives, especially cliffs and climbable areas.

A New Cave

I have one cave that I need (you have to move through it to get through an area) to draw, that I just hadn’t yet, so I finally got started on that.

Some Pictures

It’s been a while since I’ve posted any screenshots from Black Mountain so here we go. The maps are not “finished”, they’re missing bits and pieces like trees, etc.