Level Progression

Let's see if I can manage to remember everything I've learned over the past few weeks dealing with level progression... I'm going off of straight-up memory, so, surely I won't forget anything. I did consider taking notes on a few occasions, but decided it was too much work. This was probably not ideal.

Getting Old Sucks

Also, who would've thought restarting a level could be so difficult? Certainly not I. That is, until I managed to forget some fairly fundamental concepts. Namely, queue_free(), PackedScene.instantiate(), and Node.add_child(). Who would've thought that things which are shown in nearly every tutorial would be so useful? It's almost like these three methods are fundamental to Godot projects or something. And don't ask me how many tutorials I've done. That's the worst part...

This led me to start pursuing the idea of manually resetting all the items in the level and respawning the player object manually, among other things. This got infuriating very quickly. Then, after several bouts of rage-googling, I finally ran across someone mentioning queue_free(), and then the memories started rolling in from the long-forgotten, deep recesses of my mind. Making use of this method, and the others mentioned above, made restarting the level much more straightforward, and it seems to just work with the way the nodes are currently organized. This may not be the most beautiful or elegant, but hey, at least it works.

So now, the level is restarting, and it's even counting the coins with full tracking and everything. The end level flag even resets and is setup properly when the level is restarted, allowing the user to replay the level to their heart's content. If you'd like to check out the latest iteration, you can find it here.

Quick Note on Mac Builds

I looked into this ever so briefly, and found that an Apple Developer ID Certificate is required, which itself requires signing up for a $100/year developer account. It also sounds like I would need to be doing the builds on an actual Mac device, which sounds like a lot of work (I may be wrong about this...). Now, I'm not fundamentally against, or offended by, this, but I don't think this project warrants such things. Well ok, there is something that does somewhat upset me: the only way for a Mac build to "just work" on a Mac, is to host the project on their actual App Store. The next best thing requires some documentation to help the user run the app when you do everything right¹ except for distribute on the App Store. Right now, it's iterations I'm going for, not profits, so I'll be forgoing this for now.

What's Next

First things first, we need to go and clean up some stuff from that last body of work. There's some naming that could be improved, and some repeated bits that need to be refactored. I'd like to think I can make use of scene inheritance to make adding levels more straightforward, and I'm still not 100% convinced that the Marker2D is doing what I think it's doing for the player start.

After this, we'll see about adding the two enemies from the art pack. They'll just idle, take damage and die for now to keep things simple. This will also require adding the attack, damage, and death animations for the player, to prove all this is working. Should be a decent next task.

Now/Next/Never

• Now
  • Refactor a bit
  • Add Carrot and Mushroom enemies (idle, damage, death only)
  • Add player attack, damage, death
• Next
  • Add timer to level and end-level
  • Add tracking for best time
• Never
  • Main menu
  • Pause menu
  • Enemy movement and attack
  • Level obstacles/items (spikes, platforms, ladders)