Day 2

My time was split into two chunks, with the days goal to be spent on gameplay and "finding the fun". I had the idea falling asleep the night before to make a mini game/rhythm game for the catch mechanics to make catching/loosing a spirit a bit more then hitting space bar at the same time.

I updated the player controller to handle swinging the net independently of moving, I had though making the player pause on swinging would making catching a bit harder but it felt terrible so I changed it to just worrying about the swing timing. The game immediately felt better. I also added the ability to swing an item which relates to another piece of this games gameplay I'll discus in a bit. But I will say I was really worried about the swinging and procrastinated starting my day for a good two hours, I got the animation going with an AnimationPlayer and collision layers pretty quick but changing swing directions sent me through a loop and was getting messy fast. A friend suggested I try stacking the animation, body, and item in one Node2d tree and that simplified the code to a single line! I may add the ability pointing up and down but for now I am leaving it with the constraint of only left and right making the player worry a bit more about positioning and planning the critter escape route.

I also kept working on the AI of the spirits (or critters) they now wander around till they notice the player before they attempt to run away and return to their home area once it might be safe. I also added some more states to pause their AI.

Catch mechanics!  Two key take aways: this was far easier to get together then I anticipated and also.. I still do not like game engine UI. I have over 10 years in front end web dev and man HTML and CSS really does some aspects of UI right. I quickly decided to not spend the end of my night fighting with the looks of it and save it for a polish day. Any who what is the catch mechanic? It's a small input simon says minigame at the moment. I wanted to keep it pretty easy / accessible but I hope to implement catch chaining and increasing the difficultly as the chain gets higher. I am also quite pleased to say I did this entirely without a tutorial/reference, I just dove in with my engine knowledge and got something pretty nice and reusable on my own. Feels like a nice milestone of the engine starting to click.

Time spent: 6 hours