Man I don’t know what to say. I mean, the collision is pretty much done, but it’s been pretty much done for like three weeks now! I mean, this is definitely more done than it’s ever been before: Collision resolution seems to work consistently, ground tracking seems to work very well indeed, and only the slightest one-frame animation glitches and weirdest outliers of tile placement still seem to be causing issues. It’s… so close.
Well okay, whatever! Hopefully these last little problems will get fixed in pretty short order, and then I can return to a forgotten time where I wasn’t working on the same goddamn block of code day after day for weeks on end. That will be swell.
The other good news is that since this is all pretty much (PRETTY MUCH) done, I can start making a few changes to the movement code I had in mind. In particular I wanted to make it so that when you’re standing on a steep slope you gradually slide down – you can press towards the slope to slow that down or away from it to speed it up, but you can’t make steady headway against it since the slide is faster than your movement speed against the slope. I did that today, and it feels pretty good. I also made it so that if you jump off of a slope like that you end up jumping away from it instead of straight up like you normally would, so it’s not possible to climb hills that are too steep but it is possible to use them as stepping stones to reach otherwise difficult places. I’d post a video but there’s still some animation glitches on steep hills and I want to get those fixed first.
Let’s see… so I need to finish off the last few issues with collision, then I’m probably going to spend a bit more time tweaking movement and animations to make the character motion generally a bit smoother. Then, finally, I get back to the thing which sent me down this tangent in the first place, making test enemies. Once I have a few of those, I create character animation and programming for getting hit, and then I think I’m going to create a DANGER ROOM. Well, basically just a few small levels with enemies and platforming challenges that I can use to test out the gameplay, and even send to some friends for feedback as to what feels good or doesn’t. Basically I just want to make sure the character parameters, run speed, jump height, attack speed, etcetera, all feel nice before I start building levels on bad assumptions.
So that’s the plan! Hopefully not another one destined to be dashed to bits by another week of frustrating and tangential collision coding.