Week 17/18 - Pausing

Did not intend for these last bunch of updates to all be doubles, but that's how my free time ended up working out. Anyway, I managed to clear off the last two tasks off my list, so this will be my last update for this particular project. At least for a good while anyway, never know if I'll loop back around and finish the job later on. For now though, let's get into the details.

First up, I've got a pause menu now:

I had to tweak my viewport settings a bit and add some functionality to my camera manager to get the fade to work properly with UI layers, but besides that it's a pretty simple matter of setting the world timescale to pause, while setting the pause manager itself to only be active when the timescale is 0. Fun fact about Super Metroid's pause menu: the game is still running and accepting inputs while the fade to black is happening. As such, it is possible to cross the barrier to enter another room while in the middle of pausing. In this situation, the game cancels the pause sequence and instead transitions rooms, starting the fade at whatever value it was already at.  My system unfortunately can't support that sort of interaction without adding in quite a large chunk of functionality, so I elected to simply disable the door triggers while pausing.

I didn't end up getting the map screen fully functional, but I was satisfied that I had gained all the knowledge I needed for how to set up UI, so I elected to move on. 

Now, for the sound system... I can't exactly "show" the work I did here without recording actual videos, so I'll just do my best to explain what I did instead. The sound manager runs with two object pools, one for creating AudioStreamPlayer objects, which handle global sounds, and one for AudioStreamPlayer2D objects, which handle spatial sounds. When you want to create a sound, you pass the audio manager a reference to the file you want to play as well as whether or not it's a looping sound, where to play the sound from, and what object, if any, you want to attach it to. The manager gives you a reference to the sound emitter so that you can stop it manually if needed, and when the sound finishes playing, it uses the "Finished" signal to return itself to the proper pool. 

I also created an "AudioTrigger" script, which holds a dictionary of sound files that you can retrieve through name strings, and attached that to the object that I want to play sound effects (the player, in this case).  With the audio trigger present, I can do things like trigger footstep sounds from the player's animation whenever the sprite's foot hits the ground, or start and stop the spin jump sound effect whenever the player enters/exits the relevant state. 

Besides that, there's not much else to say.  I also set up music to play and made it so that it can transition between songs properly when changing rooms, as well as learned how to properly loop music rather than having it fade out/in whenever the song "ends".


And.... that's about it. at some point I will loop back around and clean up my code so that I can post this project as part of my work samples, but for now I have accomplished my goal of learning how to bend the Godot engine to my will. Current plans are to take a week or two to do some other studying for job search purposes, then I'll be back to start work on my first "real" Godot game. 

​See you next time.