Week of Monday, April 25th -
✓PRIMARY GOAL: Creating an Animated Sprite.
Secondary Goal: A study of state machines and applying it to the animation.
EDIT: Tuesday, May 03, 2016-
https://gfycat.com/ForsakenSourCanine
A little late on the update, but I got an animated sprite working earlier this week. I didn't concentrate much on the secondary goal, but I took a little time to start on an idea that I had. Nothing amazing, just trying to recreate Checkers with the Godot Engine. What I've gotten so far:
Just that board. So, this week, I'm planning to make my pieces and put them on the board.
Week of Monday, May 2nd -
✓PRIMARY GOAL - Getting Checkers on the Board.
Secondary Goal - Implementing Checkers movement on the board.
Monday, May 9th, 9:47 PM EST - Primary goal complete. Kinda.
What I've been doing: I've been trying to research how other games integrate movement along a game board. I've downloaded a couple of open source rpg-type games to see how they handle movement, one of those games being an open source RPG made with Godot called Tanks of Freedom.
I've been looking at its code in particular because it uses something called "selectors" in its script to decide how a player's piece moves along a pre-arranged board. I'm looking into it to see if I can dissect the code and reverse engineer it.
As far as getting the pieces on the board, I have one piece; a red static body with a sprite attached to it.
My goals for this week:
Week of Monday, May 9th -
✓PRIMARY GOAL: Changing the Game Icon.
Secondary Goal: Implementing Movement
Simple goals. Simple Goals.
Update - 05/18/16, 11:07 AM EST:
Sorry, I've been away for a couple days, and haven't posted anything regarding my progress. So here you go.
This one wasn't especially hard, considering it was an option in Godot's project structure.
What's next:
I'm still trying to figure out a way to implement the movement of pieces on the game board. It's easy in theory; after all, pieces in checkers can only move diagonally and forwards (or backwards, depending on if the pieces are kinged). The issue is translating that system programmatically. I'm still looking into more open-source projects with movement systems.
In the meantime, I have a good idea on what exactly I should be working on next that's immediately achievable and has a lot of documentation.
Week of Monday, May 16th -
✓PRIMARY GOAL: Switching Game Scenes (e.g. Menu Screen to Game Screen)
Secondary Goal: Implementing Movement.
I'm thinking about taking a period of time and dedicating it completely to researching movement and it implementation. Maybe I will do that for the next Primary Goal... if I haven't already figured it out by then.
May 23rd 2016, 1:57 PM, EST - Done. Was actually done with this earlier this week, but I waited to post it for no good reason.
New Game:
Quit Application:
I had to use some trickery to get this to work. Easy trickery, but trickery nonetheless.
Let me see if I can make sense of it:
I had to create a new script for the act of changing the scenes from one to another. The script was comprised of the "New Scene" function, which itself contained a couple of functions that cleared and flushed data regarding the scene that was loaded. From what I understand, if I wanted to, I could load global variables into this function and use them across the game scene and the menu scene.
I had to autoload the script in the project setup in order to gain access to that "NewScene" function I had written in the script.
Then it was a matter of connecting the items on my menu screen with the appropriate functions.
Week of Monday, May 23rd, 2016-
✓PRIMARY GOAL: In-Game Menu
Secondary Goal: : MOVEMENT, ARGHHHH
Trying to keep my goals simple and achieveable. Not trying to overwhelm myself trying to do something that may take a few weeks in a single week. I'm-a keep on keepin' on.
Tuesday, May 31st 2016, 12:20 PM EST:
Done. Had this one done yesterday, but decided to post today. I honestly thought this one was going to be harder than the last, but it took me all of a couple of hours of concentrated effort to do.
What's going on:
I have a pop-up pause menu that appears when I hit the escape button. While this popup is up, the game is completely paused. In order for the game to run without the pause carrying over into the next scene switch, I had to make sure that my menu scene's pause mode was set to "Process" instead of inheriting the pause from the game tree, and I had to make sure that whenever the new game scene was called, it had to start un-paused.
To be perfectly honest, I don't know where to go from here, other than getting the movement stuff going. So what I think I'm going to do is give myself a break for a week, and then start off again next Monday.