The modularity would’ve been a huge plus, I found out how important that is later in the dev cycle when I ended up with a bajillion functions shooting all over the place because I hadn’t thought of trying to compress things. Thankfully for us, computers are fast and so in a lightweight engine like Godot you can really get away with a lot of stuff. In the hustle and bustle of modern computing it can be easy to remember that even with a fairly regeular cpu like mine I’ve still got 12 threads performing over 4 billion calculations every second, that’s a lot of math.
Also, you were totally right about the Area2D vs Body2D nodes. The cattails were the third thing I made for my game (right after the walls and the player character), so at that point I didn’t really understand the difference between the two in any meaninful capacity and I was still struggling to wrap my head around the collision system. By that point I had a hammer in the form of my ability to get collision calculations to work, so those cattails were looking suspiciously nail-like. Even later on I couldn’t figure out how to fix it because part of how I got the cattails to work to begin with was by them sending a signal to the main game node, and I didn’t know about object.connect(“signal”,local_function). In hindsight it should’ve been obvious that such a function existed, but I didn’t really have a feel for the way information flowed between nodes so I didn’t think of it. Yesterday I went back in and finally made the cattails work the way they always should’ve (which also cut out almost a dozen lines of code only to add like 4), and now it’s just a really good example of how much I’ve learned through this whole thing (like you’re chessboard example!).
By every combination, what kind of depth are you using here? Just simple “one move white one move black” or what? 600-1k Elo isn’t half bad for a random chess engine whipped up in a week! It even fits in with your modular things since I’m sure you could pump that up another couple hundred elo with some more tuning.