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After-update reflections (0.2.0)

Pongus
A browser game made in HTML5

So I published Pongus 0.2.0 version and want to share some experience I got when making this one.

Firstly, I want to say that I had a victory trying to make the controlls feel more responsive and less buggy with racket stuttering when pressing multiple arrows. All thanks go to the guy, who answered this question https://godotengine.org/qa/38355/how-can-i-script-smooth-movement-for-kinematicbody2d. As I am no professional programmer, I have troubles finding better coding sollutions, so I ended up having if-else system for movement input. This is slow and requires some accuracy when writing. In my case it didn't support multiple key presses and I couldn't make this work as I wanted. Then I looked for sollutions and found this one which I consider beautiful in some way. That piece of code really makes  movement smooth. Much appreciated.

Secondly, Godot does not support MP3 files, which is a shame as I wanted to compress wav. format to make the game weigh less. Personally I think, that projects need to be cleaned up from time to time from garbage files to keep an adequate volume. Also, it prevents confusion, that's why I did this in last update, however to my shame I was too lazy to make a better file system to keep my scripts separate. Hope that I'll do that later or my project will become a mess.

Made nice animations for Defence gamemode. Meteors blow away. When doing this I understood that AnimationPlayer is your not only, but very best friend. It's a very powerful tool and I regret ignoring it before. It allows you to avoid some cumbersome coding apart from being like...you know...animation player playing animations.

I want to add that as I made some better animations and visuals for the game, some understanding came to me. I always knew that visual stuff is really important for a game to feel good. Untill this update I hadn't realised how much this affects the actual game. With animations it is a lot better and gains extra points of fun even when gameplay is primitive. For that reason I want to include one guy, whose game I have found recently when surfing the Ludum Dare 46 page. https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/46/goofball This is as in my case a clone of a classic arcade game. Here he made a good job creating impact and nice animations for the game. Here you can actually see how much those do for basically any kind of game. Never underestimate them.

And yeah, I participated in LD46 Compo. Here's my game for the challenge https://wans24.itch.io/he-needs-healing. I think that I'll make a post about my LD46 experience some time later.

Files

  • Pongus 0.2.0.zip 14 MB
    Apr 17, 2020
Download Pongus
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