Devlog: state machine, attack and combat (Patreon)

Oct 02

I had to modify my soft blending code to allow for nested state machines, but Ternera can now equip and unequip her hammer, and her walking and jumping animations adapt accordingly.

The idle animations now work perfectly. I had to figure out a way to read the elapsed time of whichever animation is currently active, which I used to time events - because I can't be arsed to manually save 60+ animations as Godot files one by one when I don't know if any changes will be needed further on. I'll use that trick to time the sounds and attack hitboxes later on.

Oct 03

The attack state is visually functional, Ternera swings her hammer and can use charged attacks, although there are no weapon hitboxes or visual effects yet. I also added her jump attack to the air state. All the remaining states are now context sensitive - climbing, grabbing objects, getting hurt, locking on enemies, and ramming (since she can crash onto static geometry). I'll have to add a few blocks and dummies to the level before I can continue typing code.

Oct 04

I have built the whole base structure for the state machine, now I have to fill in every state. The damage and ramming states are functional, although they're missing the autojump and the UV realignment so Ternera's expression changes when she gets hurt. The latter scares me, but it needs to get done.

Behavior state machine

Oct 06

Combining the idle and base states hasn't made the state machine tidier, but the transitions do look a lot better. I have also removed the standing-up animation because I doubt the player wants to wait for their input to be processed while the character slowly gets back into action - it will be used for cutscenes only. I have taken a page out of the Ocarina of Time book and removed the equipping animation: if the player uses their weapon, they attack immediately. To avoid stopping them on their tracks, inertia is considered if they're running.

Base state

Oct 06 bis

In order to smoothly blend movement in two directions, I've created another abomination. Fortunately, experience adds up, so despite looking horrifying, this shouldn't be too hard to program.

Smooth 2D walking animation blend tree

Oct 07

The combat state is complete and it looks gorgeous. Defining the movement centered around a target took me a little while, until I realized it was much easier than I was making it to be. I just had to make the character's rotation equal to her angle relative to her target, then apply the player's input relative to the camera view. There's still some major mechanics left to program, but we're quickly approaching the same spot where we left off on Unity.