Star Child News

Jay Ingle - lead developer, designer, and artist:

This week I made a shootable switch. This switch, once activated, contacts the Global Signal Bus, emitting a signal that opens a nearby door. With a tiny bit of additional code, this switch can be used to signal the activation or opening of anything we wish.

Then I made the door, and connected the signal that the switch sends, to a local function in the door script, which actually opens the door, changes the sprite, and removes the hitbox collision. Just as with the switch, this door is ready to be updated for more functionality, and is able to be opened by any source we want via the Global Signal Bus. Improved door graphics and animation coming soon!



This week I also made some new item pickup graphics. Each area in Star Child will contain a number of secret keys that can be used to access secret bosses, secret upgrades, and all the other cool things you definitely want to find!

Jay Ingle - lead developer, designer, and artist:

Allowing the player to rebind controls, using the Godot engine, is complicated and difficult. The basics aren't too bad, but when you get into the details, things get very complex, very quickly. Input events and actions are data structures in Godot, and they are difficult to understand, work with, and debug.

I spent most of this week staring at my controls rebinding code, pondering, considering, what EXACTLY do I want to do with this current code? It almost works perfectly, but it is abysmal to debug. I could take some time to restructure it into a less-confusing mess. I have some good ideas.

In between sessions of looking at dumb UI code, I updated the graphics and effects on some of my environmental mechanics. The new tech style is different from our alien planet organic style, which can make these important objects stand out from the alien environment.









Janne - the other guy:

Jay took a bit of time to finally show me how to use our level template scenes to create new test levels, so I had a bit of fun playing around with them, experimenting with how it all works, and doing some testing. Found a few more things we might want to fix due to this testing.

Jay Ingle - lead developer, designer, and artist:

This week I made teleporters. Two of them, working as a pair. I got them working pretty quick. They are fully functional, but limited in a few ways: there has to be exactly two of them, and they each have to be designated as the initial starting or destination teleporter. Since they share a script, and signals, more code would be needed if I wanted them to behave in any other way.

Then I added the visual effects, a red/green particle effect on the teleporter itself: green indicating which teleporter is active, and red your destination. And I think the player shrinking/growing when teleporting works well to sell the effect.

Creating levels with these teleporters is fun, and when mixing together all of the other mechanics and gimmicks I have already, there is no end to the flow of ideas.




Janne - the other guy:

Unfortunately the system we'd been using previously for keeping track of the progress is being shut down, and I've been investigating what options are best for us. I found that Mattermost supports boards, and they seem to be ok - not great, but good enough for what we need. Since I already have a Mattermost server running, I thought it would be a fine thing to start using and I've been migrating our content over.

Also I did some play testing and fixed a bunch of small issues I found with our controls, loading settings, file structure, sound buses, and gathered a list of issues I found overall with the gameplay.

Jay Ingle - lead developer, designer, and artist:

This week I set out to make a bunch of mini-challenges, using my existing enemies and environmental hazards. These little challenges will mostly be hidden in the numerous secret areas throughout the game. I made 10 of these this week, here are a couple of them!



Creating this spikey room made me want to create more levels for my first game (Toleo). Toleo has lots of spikes, and precise platforming. But for Star Child, we are making a less difficult game, so the challenge here is much lower than Toleo. Spikes, as the only challenge in a room, will be very minimal, but keep your eyes open for just a little Toleo-style spikey-hell in Star Child!



I made some rooms with only one enemy type, and some rooms with every combination of enemy and hazard I currently have. I think these crawlers are cute.

Steam has some file size limits on embeds, click on the images for higher quality screen recordings.

Here's the latest updates in the development of Star Child


Jay Ingle - lead developer, designer, and artist:

Lately I've been playing with fireballs again, prototyping the mini challenges I'm trying to build into the game.

For this I used the projectile classes and scenes I set up previously, wrote some projectile spawning logic, and coded some signals so the nodes can tell the turret when they die.

Still working on getting the projectiles pointing the right way, Godot's look_at() doesn't seem to work quite as I expected for this and I might need to write my own logic instead.

Looking forward to creating some cool graphics for this little encounter. Would appreciate any suggestions you might have on visual design. I'm planning on reusing a smaller and simpler version in other parts of the levels.




Janne - the other guy:

I've been working mostly on the little background things, continued setting up accounts, preparing materials, collecting lists of contacts, and planning how we'll find a significant number of relevant contacts before the launch.

Most of my weeks are fairly light on the different types of work, so the updates for my part are going to be typically shorter than on the first one 🙂