A Reminder, a Poll and a Small Update (Patreon)

Hello everyone,
Just a reminder that pledges will reactivate soon. I figure Patreon probably notifies you of this somehow but another heads-up couldn't hurt.

In related news, it's been an excellent month for progress. Proxima's collision system had already been created to handle bounding boxes of various sizes so Betelgeuse was able to hit the ground running with a taller character.

Since collisions are already in a good place I had the opportunity to take on a new challenge: setting up a player character state machine. While there was more to Proxima than I showed in the Potentially Acceptable Collisions video, the character itself was pretty barebones. All it could do was move, jump and wall jump without any animation. Betelgeuse is a little more action orientated which requires a larger number of states. This is where the state machine comes in, it's a way of determining where/when/how the player character can transition between different actions.

I took the cowboy approach here and just started building without much forethought but one of my initial ideas proved to be extremely valuable. Rather than try to implement my own character right off the bat, I decided to use a pre-existing one - in this case Richter from Rondo of Blood. It might have been tempting to just cobble together whatever I happened to need as I went but crafting it with a pre-existing character in mind gave me a really tangible goal to shoot for. Using someone who already existed also allowed for rapid development which quickly revealed any flaws in my approach. I've been cycling through this process all month, implementing a new aspect to the character and adjusting the overall state machine to support it. Although there's always more improvements to be made, it's in a really good place right now. Most importantly, my approach is designed for rapid implementation and iteration (a data-driven design for the programmers in the audience) which should allow me to tweak things easily and efficiently. Once I've hammered out a few more issues I'm even thinking that it might be valuable to try implementing another character (like Alucard or something) in order to put the system through its paces. Whatever happens from here, I'm really happy with it so far and will definitely talk about it more in the future. There's even a few tiny features I think are cool which I'm looking forward to showing off.

That said, it's been an extremely productive month but an equally busy one to match. I've been going at this flat out and am now ready for a break. Just in time to spend the next few days binging The Great Ace Attorney. As such, there's not going to be a Developer Diary to round out the month. I have some stuff written but I always feel the need to dwell on the diaries since putting them in writing makes them feel "final" or something. That leads to my question. I figure many of you might prefer an Audio Log anyway so should I try one? This would just be me talking into the mic for a while, random thoughts on the project and games in general I suppose. Like the diaries have been so far but probably less concise and more meandering. Not a great sales pitch but it would be in audio format which you might find easier and more enjoyable to consume. Let me know in the poll below what you think.

One more thing before I go. I wanted to get this into the next Developer Diary before pledges restarted but since there isn't going to be one in time: If you're a patron you should know that Betelgeuse is planned to be a pretty straightforward and traditional action platformer. In other words it's a linear game where you walk forward and hit (or maybe shoot) stuff. It'll probably also be really hard. If that doesn't sound interesting (or if you're not ok with the lack of a diary this month) you should reconsider your pledge.

Anyway, I think that about does it. Sorry I don't have any more for you right now but it's been a fantastic month on my end and a huge relief too after stalling out on Proxima. I'll be back soon with more. Thanks for reading and for all the support.