Man. I hate writing updates after bad weeks where I don’t get much done. Still, it’s part of the job, and it helps keep me honest. Better to write the unpleasant update than to fail to write the unpleasant update. That would feel even worse.
So okay, more tweaks to character movement and associated code. Biggest change is a slight change to the slope-slidey animations to make them look more natural near the top of the slope, plus the ability to run up the last bit of a slope if you’re close enough that it looks like the character should be able to just take a little step to get on top. That stuff feels pretty good. Unfortunately, in the process of testing all that out i found a bug in the normal character/cliff interaction that I haven’t been able to figure out. She behaves perfectly against cliffs on her left side, pushing up if she’s close to landing on them and snapping to the surface when she gets close enough, but the cliffs on the right side behave poorly, pushing her downwards instead of upwards and generally not working quite right. I think this is a glitch with the ground tracking, but I’m having a hard time figuring out how it’s happening, since the character isn’t even supposed to be tracking ground when that’s happening. That’s frustrating, and honestly my problems with this are probably contributing to the funk I find myself in. The best solution is probably to note the problem down for later and move on.
Easier said than done. I don’t like ignoring problems which I know are there. Still, all I need to do is get to a place where I care more about a new problem than an old one and I can move along.
Oh, I’ve also found a problem in collision detection between the character and vertically moving platforms (silly me, all of my test platforms were horizontal). This is probably a higher priority fix, and I don’t feel like it should be that hard to tackle, if I can just get my head in the game. Bleh.
Anyway, I’ll probably try to do some parallel productive part of the project for a while if I can’t settle my brain on this. Maybe I’ll start sketching the first few areas on graph paper, or make some more prototype animations, or start making some test enemies like I keep saying I will. Probably anything is better than hammering my head on the same section of code over and over again.