Devlog: ladders and non-euclidean grove

I missed last week's devlog because I hadn't had the time to get anything done, but there's a bunch of juicy progress this time.

Nov 23

I drew the textures for the rope bridges and the rope ladders, and I extended the rope bridge asset to also work as a rope ladder. It'll probably be needed only once or twice, so no need to make a bunch of specific code for it.

Nov 27

The ladder climbing animation and mechanic are complete and working properly. I fixed a minor bug on the rope bridges that use physics, and also simplified the player's attack: now enemies don't have to both be in the "enemies" group and include a reaction method. Now all attacks just check if the reaction method exists. If it doesn't, it isn't an enemy.

Nov 28

I just figured out why Ternera sometimes jumps when walking onto a bridge, even after I changed the code so she'll walk over small terrain differences: I forgot that the collider of the treetop village platforms doesn't exactly align with the model, since I was using Godot's cylinder shapes instead of the exact visual mesh. That causes the bridge to align perfectly with the visual mesh, but not the platform collider, which produces a little height difference. Adjusting the collider radius did the trick just fine.

Nov 29

I've adjusted all the geometry in the treetop village room and added all dynamic props that the player can interact with. I'll save all NPC interactions for a later phase. Time to start programming the non-euclidean grove.

Nov 30

Teleporting the player around is really easy using Godot's Transform3D operations. However, there is an issue: the lighting doesn't follow the player, so the relative angle of the sun itself needs to be adjusted. This would make the level look inconsistent, so I'll either make the light perfectly vertical while in the maze or remove the sun altogether and have local illumination.

Dec 1

The non-euclidean maze seems to work perfectly, save for some visual kinks. The navigation sequence is currently generated at random, but it will eventually be static, once learned in level 7. Every time the player walks into a new room, they're teleported back to the central room and the maze rearranges seamlessly around it. These are the rules I've followed:

• The room right behind the player is, of course, the former center room they just walked out of.

• If the player is correctly following the navigation sequence, one of the remaining side rooms has to be the next one in the sequence.

• If the player did not correctly follow the navigation sequence, the first room in the sequence is guaranteed to appear at least every two rooms, so that the player doesn't get stuck in the maze permanently.

• If the player re-enters the first room in the sequence, one of the rooms around it is guaranteed to be the maze entrance, so they can leave.

• If the player manages to complete the navigation sequence, one of the side rooms is the exit of the maze.

I'm quite happy with how clean the code has come out. I'll try to post a video of the whole level as soon as the visual kinks of the forest are fixed.