Week 1 - Make Something Happen

So, our first full week of development is done. Where are we at?
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Well, most of the week was actually spent gathering assets and getting those assets into a usable state. The gathering went pretty smoothly; Spriters-Resource had a full collection of character and enemy sprites as well as fully ripped tile sets for me to use. Unfortunately, neither of those could be used in the states I found them in, and that's where most of my effort for the week ended up going. For sprites, I had to convert the sheets to have a transparent background, isolate each frame, and then recombine them into sheets with a standardized grid size, all while fixing any errors I ran into with positioning and framing. Fun fact; did you know that Samus has approximately 720 different animation frames in Super Metroid? Needless to say, this took awhile, especially since I ended up having to go through the whole lot of them twice. Tile sets were a little bit easier; I just had to go in and add mirrored versions for any sloped tiles, since they only included one direction for each tile type.

After getting the art settled, I imported all of Samus' sprites and got the animations plugged in to an AnimationPlayer node, which I then started hooking into an AnimationTree. Since I'm just starting out and wanted to get something working on the screen, I only built out the basic idle, move, and turn states.

Not the prettiest thing in the world, but we'll spend some time organizing it properly later.  Need to think of a system so that this thing doesn't turn into a massive spaghetti pile with just how many different animation states are in this game. 

With that in place, we made a basic placeholder character object and went to work setting up the architecture for a state machine. I'm not quite used to Godot's practice of needing a separate "scene" for each and every script I want, but I'm sure it'll get easier to wrap my head around over time. Just like the Animation Tree, we focused on getting basic movement working first, and here's what our final progress point looks like for the end of the week:

Certainly not bad, but there's still a lot of work to do even with what is here. We'll need to add in acceleration/deceleration for the running to make it more game accurate, make sure the Turning state can properly handle transitioning between crouching, jumping, and falling states, and eventually tackle the hell that will be dealing with all of the different "aiming" sub-states that Samus has. Before we get into the weeds there though, I'm going to try to fill out the rest of the basic movement set, so next up on the agenda will be jumping, crouching, and maybe morphball.  Only after we've got the basics accounted for will we loop back around and start fine-tuning and adding more layers of complexity.

​See you next time.