Modularity is Everything...

The feedback I've gotten, after just two months of work on this design, has been a wonderful motivator. Of course, that's quite different from the total time working on games in general; I've been doing it as a hobby since I was maybe thirteen. In a sense, this has lessons from Way of the Bee, Blaster Princess, and a number of short indies built into it, too.

Neither of those are published on Itch, yet. You'll see them again when I pick them up again, a little older and wiser, down the line. The truth is, I spent months on each before determining that they simply weren't fun enough in their initial design, did a post-mortem, gathered up my material, and moved on. 

Way of the Bee was initially done in Unity; but, for reasons I don't want to get into, I'm very hesitant about going back into business with that engine. It will likely be re-implemented at some point in Godot, O3DE, or possibly Unreal. I got a lot of lessons about what a procedural environment can do for you, and what it will inevitably take away, which has been very useful. It was all about surviving as a line of queen bees, running a hive in various environments as ages passed on. I learned a lot about post-processing with that, too.

Blaster Princess is a joke about itself, and a funny one; it's related to the plethora of team-versus-team shooters like Team Fortress 2. Mostly it familiarized me with how to work with Godot and create a finished product. It will definitely be back. I learned a great deal about rigid bodies, and why they're often hell for a platformer; the many different ways of working with joints versus reparenting; and how to keep control logic separated and modular. That is, incidentally, related to what I'm discussing today!

As of yet, I've introduced two alternate flavors for Hans—Lemon, and Licorice. Lemon is ultra-fast and high jumping, but often tricky to control. Licorice is super heavy, but much slower. As of yet, that's the only real difference aside from an early acceleration sound effect for Lemon Hans. The big problem is that they feel almost identical to regular Cherry Hans, but sped up or slowed down, with mildly different environmental effects. That's a no-go for me. Flavors should feel different.

I currently have my control logic broken up into three phases—vertical, lateral, and shape key processing. Previously, they were private functions; but given how the power-ups work, I noticed that it was possible to make them a special thing called a Callable (that's what most programmers call "first-class citizen functions") that can be swapped out. I'm going to be experimenting further with that today, using Lemon Hans, to make him slip just a little when he stops, or use an acceleration curve, which could be great for puzzles down the road.

The other thing I've done is create a node branch that power-ups can add onto. As an example, the up-and-coming Peach Hans should be able to grab the swinging vine candies and Pitfall off of them; but the best way to do that is with an Area3D that reparents to a skeleton bone. That's not just new controls (and alternating controls), but also new structure. Peach Hans is probably going to come together in the next few days, and I'll release level three with the swinging vines. It should be trivial now, but it's something I haven't done yet and I do hate to assume that there won't be mild issues along the way.