Peddlers between Pulsars - Devlog 4

Not as much done as usual - I took 2 weeks off work and gamedev for a vacation. Spent lots of time baking in the sun, away from the computer screen.

Most of the changes were graphics and code organization. I'll talk about the graphics first.

Animations

All the walk and idle anims and characters are done. All 5 here! wiggling around. Except the human. They're not very wiggly.

A human watches as a gas, beetle, mollusk, and plant with idle animations

I'm particularly fond of this one's (Gitrah's) little walk. It's not as lurchy as I'd like it, but if I made it more jerky, they'd feel too awkward to play.

A plant lurches around

Interface

The text was awful before, and I knew that. I was using a font that wasn't monospaced onto a PNG, and told Godot to render it as a monospaced font. So I cleaned up the menus a bit and made it a proper font - but with some characters modified to be subscripts instead.

Also, name tags and a nicer text box. But not a nicer ship, yet.

There is a plant talking to a gas alien in a pink alpine area. The text box is labeled "Neon" and says "Someone is looking for some C12H22O11 - that compound specifically. They were upset with the C70 I gave them." There is an placeholder ship image in the map.

Code Refactoring

NPCs and cutscenes needed work - I want them to vary depending on the player character. Not just a few different lines - each character should see different parts of the events depending on who they're playing as. Unplayed characters should show up as NPCs in the world - but not if you're playing as them, and have all the custom animations they have as players.

Cutscenes are still a mess. But they're in a much better position to start handling playing the same scene from the different perspective of the 5 player characters.

NPC Players sounds simple, but Godot is the first time I've worked in a language without multiple inheritance (and noticed). So no smashing the NPC and Player objects together, had to rethink my structure a bit and clean things up.

Tags: Peddlers Between Pulsars