Week 13/14 - Room to Improve

Alright, it's been a hot minute since the last time I was able to give an update. Life got a bit hectic so I had to take a bit of a hiatus from my project work in order to deal with everything, but now I should be more or less back on my normal work schedule. 

So this update is probably roughly equivalent to 2 weeks of actual dev work spread out across a little over a month, and what have we done during that time? Well, I introduced the concept of "Rooms" to the codebase, which store data for the tile sets and trigger volumes of a small chunk of environment as well as map coordinates (which will come in handy later). They also indirectly hold information on their neighboring rooms via the newly added transition triggers I made, which in turn allows us to move from room to room. 

And that's really what I spent the bulk of the time working on; room transitions. In Metroid, when the player walks through a door, they don't just simply appear in the next room, the game pauses, everything fades to black except for the door itself, the camera pans in the direction of the new room, and then everything fades back in before gameplay resumes. This process hides any load jitters while also being pretty visually appealing at the same time, but each step of that process involves a new system that I had to make.

Pausing the world is relatively simple thanks to Godot's timescale and Processing type options, just need to select the top-level node and tell it to pause, and set a few choice objects to be able to continue to run their update loops even when the timescale is paused. The fade involves attaching a giant black rectangle to the camera and adding scripts to allow it to transition from one color to another over time, and the actual camera movement only needed some slight adjustments to the camera manager system I set up as part of my last update. In order to get the whole sequence put together, I also had to figure out how callback functions work in Godot, which luckily ended up not being that much different from what I'm used to in Unity.  Technically I could have just used signals to get functions to fire when I need them, but having to connect and disconnect to signals repeatedly every time I ran through the process seemed like a lot more work than just passing in a callback function.

There's a little more magic happening behind the scenes when it comes to placing the rooms in the proper position in the world and making sure the player's movement and height are carried over between room transitions, but that's just some simple math at the end of the day. 

Now, as for what's next.... 14 weeks is actually a pretty short amount of time when it comes to game development, but the fact of the matter is that this project was supposed to be a relatively short one. Theoretically I could keep chipping away until I more or less recreate the whole game, but the point of this exercise was to familiarize myself with the Godot engine before I move on to working on something of my own. To that end, I have made a list of topics/features that I want to cover before I can declare this project over. Here's what we have left:

- Mini-map
- Pause Menu
- Save/Load
- Sound and Music

I've determined that basically everything else on the feature list I originally wrote up is either something I have already figured out how to do during my time with the engine, or something that the engine doesn't meaningfully effect the implementation of. As such, those won't be much help as a learning tool, and I'd be better off spending my time elsewhere. So all things considered, we're actually pretty close to the end here. I've been doing some thinking about the project I'll be starting up once I'm done with the Metroid stuff, and I'll talk some more about that when we get there.  For now, next thing on the docket is the map functionality.

​See you next time.