Hi, I'm probably a bit too late with this response for it to actually help in the game jam, but here it is:
There are many different ways you can communicate between Nodes. You dont need to use all of them, just chose one that works for whatever you want to do.
#1 Call down: Lets say we have a node "Parent" and its child node "Child". If you're up in the hierarchy (Parent), it is recommended to access child properties by just calling them/their getter, setter methods.
You can get a reference to the Node by its name like this inside a function (both lines do the exact same thing):
get_node("Child").get_x()
$Child.get_x()
To get a reference of a node at a script level scope, you can also use @onready like this:
@onready var child = $Child
#2 Signal up: If the child node wants to access the parent node, you again have multiple options:
If you know the exact relative or absolute path of the node you want to access, you could just use:
get_parent().get_x()
get_node("/root/Parent").get_x()
However, since this can become messy really quickly, its better to use signals here, eg:
Parent:
func _ready(): $Child.x_changed.connect(set_var)
func set_var(x): print(x)
Child:
signal x_changed(new_value)
func _process(delta): if Input.is_action_just_pressed("ui_accept"): x_changed.emit(1)
Another way to pass data is the "Event Bus" pattern:
In a singleton (autoload) called gd define all your events as signals
e.g.
```signal player_died
signal player_collected_item item```
Then in game trigger events like this:
`GameEvents.player_died.emit()`
Then in other nodes listen for the event like so:
`GameEvents.player_died.connect(self._player_died)`
