Week 11 - Drops

Couldn't think of a stupid joke for the title this week.  Anyway, I started off things by reviewing my list of goals for this project and I ended up cutting a number of things from the queue. My primary goal here isn't to recreate the entirety of Super Metroid, but to use existing designs in order to get used to using Godot. to that end, I removed things from my todo list that I have already figured out how to do in the engine, which will reduce the amount of time I need to spend on this training arc before I can start building something for real.

As for the actual implementation work for the week, I didn't run into any real surprises. First up, I finally added death effects for my enemies, though I did have to use the morphball bomb explosion effect as a placeholder, at least until I can find and slice up the real enemy death explosions.

The real explosions in the game do a better job of hiding the sprite pop, but functionality wise this one is done. Next was getting enemies to drop items when they die. Again, this was pretty simple in itself; I defined all the different types of drops, made them increment the player's stats when collided with, and set up data resources so that enemies can define their own drop rates for each type of item. Thing is, Metroid actually has a bit of a system when it comes to item drops: items don't drop if the player is full on that particular resource, and the drop rates of other items that the player is missing are boosted. I did not replicate the behavior exactly as it appears in the games, but I made a close approximation. When an enemy wants to drop an item, the Drop Manager looks at the player's current status. It only takes into account drop weights of resources that the player is currently not full on, skipping over those that are already topped off, and thus making sure that only things that the player needs will spawn.

While I don't truly have logic for missiles, super missiles, and power bombs up and running yet, I did still create the full suite of ammo drops as well.  

And.... that's about it for this week. Next up, I'm planning on shifting my attention to Godot systems that I'm less familiar with, specifically camera control and scene transitions. Once I get the ability to swap rooms working, hopefully I can start to figure out how save data works in this engine.

​See you next time.