Overcoming Shortcomings With Creativity

Since my last post I decided to try and attack what I felt would be the hardest thing to accomplish, the wheel menu system.

Fortunately I realized after a bit of pondering that I did something similar when I made the start menu for CatAttack!!!

My solution was to create an animation for each of the possible rotations, start and exit. Doesn't look like much (right now), but it works the way I need it to. A state machine will be used for each of the possible animations and the accompanying logic that each selection will have to do. It's not fully set up yet, but since I've done something similar before I don't see an issue.

The next task that needed to be done is an inventory system (this turned out to be a lot harder than the wheel menu).

While there are a quite a few drag and drop inventory system tutorials on the net, I wanted one that would operate somewhat like Tetris (uneven “blocks”) and would function easily using a controller. This was quite a goal that I had set for myself, and after spending days watching/doing tutorials on arrays and matrices I came to the realization that it's going to be a while before I have a working understanding on how they operate and how to make them do what I want. Being the impatient artiest I am, I decided on a workaround solution using the knowledge I already have and understand.

So the first thing I needed to solve was grid based movement. Thankfully there are quite a few tutorials on the subject and I managed to find one that gave me enough framework to build upon (the red cursor moves smoothly between 64X64 tiles).

The second issue was grabbing items in the inventory and having the player decide what to do with it via a button press. The solution was an easy pop up menu that would ask what the player wanted to do with the grabbed item, animation and logic controlled by a state machine.

The third and most difficult issue was instantiating these irregular blocks onto a grid. This is the part were I spent days looking at array tutorials. My solution was forgo the array for now and spawn the item in the top left corner, then to create a “track”, have the item travel around this track looking for a free spot using raycast to detect area colliders on each item. This is horribly inefficient, but dose the job. I haven't inserted this framework into my MVP yet so it is possible my solution will fall apart when trying to actually integrate it. But I'm positive I can overcome it with my bubblegumnojutsu.

Anyway I bought some Godot tutorials on Udemy. I'll probably spend the next few days doing tutorials and reinforcing my foundations as I try to integrate the inventory system into my MVP.