Level transitions are now fully working. To be entirely honest, I thought it would be a lot harder than this, but that was probably my engineer-oriented mind making things a lot harder than it should be. It started with about three nested Area2Ds each keeping track of the player’s location and what floor they’re entering/exiting from and heaven forbid they go partially up/down to the next level and then go back down and the entire game breaks, and then it occurred to me that maybe, just maybe, I’m overcomplicating things a bit too much. So now it’s just one Area2D that checks the player’s enter/exit coordinates against its own and fades in the next level based on that and disables the last level’s collisions. A few more tweaks and it’s just about perfect. What I would like to do next is scale the last level down as the player is traversing to the next one so it looks like the player is actually going above/below it, but again, I am more concerned right now with the underlying mechanics of the game than how it looks.

Some of the big changes from this past week:

• Traversing different floors now (mostly) works as intended
• Expanding the game area, rearranging a few things
• Organizing nodes and child nodes for future-proofing

I think I am getting pretty close to the point where I will have to hire an actual artist to make this game look good. I am not an artist, nor am I even a good programmer. But maybe if I hire someone to fix that first part nobody will even notice that I have 100+ Area2Ds in a single scene.

Game of the Week

Team Fortress 2. You are the drug that I cannot quit, but I do not have any interest in quitting you. You are old enough to drive, and it shows. You are infested with bots, hackers, and generally some of the most insufferable people on the planet. But if you dig deep enough, if you put up with it long enough, some of that flair of what made you such an amazing game when I first played you eleven years ago still shines through.

Godspeed, you magnificent bastard.