Today ended up being the most productive Saturday I have had in a while.

After my write up last night, my brain was branching off on new ideas and thoughts. I began envisioning the levels being platforms in a broad 3D space, and when you finished one, it would whisk you off to another with slick animation. And you could see in some form the levels around, beside, below, etc.

It was a really cool idea. And it was far too ambitious to try to do right now.

Granted, it would be fun to try, and there’s nothing ruling out doing something like that ultimately. But what stuck in my mind was this image of the puzzle level sitting on this thin sort of platform floating in space or air or whatever you like.

First thing this morning, I swapped out the plane used as a background with a thin, broad cube – the same side, but not with some depth. Given the angle of view, it was hard to see the depth, so I bumped it up a bit.

Then I bumped it up a bit more.

Then for grins, I bumped it up a whole lot more, and suddenly I saw something I really liked. It’s probably not fantastic in the gaming world, and it’s not what I would go with if I had more artistic talent or a better vision. But I like it enough that I’m happy to settle on this for now. I mean, this is just a passion indie game that likely will never go anywhere. I want to get it to the point where people can play it. I just need something to build on.

I sometimes feel like I’m avoiding working on the levels. Perhaps I am. But there is also a rationale for getting some of the more global details settled: it’s easier recreating a few levels than a few hundred. With what I have now, I feel like the idea is solid enough that (hopefully) things won’t change too drastically, at least for this first round.

Here is the first level, reworked:

Initially, it was just a cube (properly sized). That was easy to deal with. The next level has jog in it, and I wanted the background to follow. If nothing else, it helps to see the 3D.

Man, that was a pain.

Sure, you can resize and move blocks fairly easily in Godot, but trying to butt blocks up against each other isn’t easy. And if you want to make a block larger, it resizes from the center, so then you have to guess around how large it will be and then reposition it. Not bad for one or a few, but after completing the even more complex third level (which wasn’t even that complex), I was at the point where I knew that approach wasn’t going to be workable.

Then it occurred to me that perhaps this was a good time to re-evaluate GridMaps, now that I know what will actually be in them. I started out with a simple tall narrow cube, full height but 1×1. Immediately, I hit the problem that the GridMap was centering this tall cube in the Y direction, whereas I wanted it to be top aligned.

I tried offsetting the GridMap to make the top line up, but then the perspective camera made painting the blocks impossible. (You would need to figure out where the bottom way down there would be.) Thinking now, a top view or orthogonal camera would have solved that. What I did instead was to research the problem, and I learned that others had it, and there was no solution in Godot for it besides creating your own mesh in an external tool like Blender.

That’s what I ended up doing. A lot more transpired after that, including some really frustrating things around getting the mesh to show up and the fact that the GridMap plane can be moved up and down, and to pan the view you use the middle mouse button plus shift, and it turns out that if you hold down the shift key and spin the mouse wheel, the plane moves up and down. I noticed the grid had changed colors, and the objects being placed no longer lined up. It took me too long to figure out what the heck was going on. Even now, even being careful, when panning I will occasionally move the plane by accident and have to reposition it.

On the positive side, being able to move the plane up and down opened up some creative possibilities in terms of level design (“artistic” more than functional), so it ended up net positive after quite a while of hair tearing. You can see how the corners in the above picture are a little lower. It’s not worthy of hanging in a museum, but it does break up the monotony a bit.

Some more levels:

I finally feel like I know it string the levels together now.

Time to start building out the game more.

Day 31: A bit scary at times. But also something sweet in the end. (Ok, corny. I know.)

The final day of devtober. The month has flown. Not every day was great advances, but a little each day gets you somewhere.

I’ll write up the post mortem tomorrow.