It’s the end of the first weekend. I managed to finish a few important pieces and numerous unimportant pieces. Here are some hiccups and what I did to work around them.
I started by making a walk cycle to get into the swing of things. Moving around is an important first step, pun intended.
Immediately after this I encountered a problem where moving left would cause the character to spaz out and flip left and right once per frame for as long as the left button was held. It turns out that Godot does not like having a KinematicBody flipped horizontally (scale.x = -1) and will override that. It was not, as I suspected, an issue with the animation resetting scale. The workaround here was to move the skeleton beneath a Node2D and flip that. It means the hitboxes won’t be flipped correctly, but I’ll have to keep them centered and balanced.
The next thing I worked on was analog stick input and variable speed walk cycles. I wanted to cool off a bit from that bug, so I spent a short while setting up key and controller inputs, then tweaking the scaling between the walk rate and the animation rate. I have a move speed and an animation multiplier speed. The move speed can vary by character, but the animation multiplier stays fixed. If a character moves 20 units per second, the animation plays at (20*animation_multiplier)x normal speed. I just have to play with the multiplier until the feet look right. One problem that comes from this is scaling. If the models change scale (or I change animation) I’ll need to readjust the animation_multiplier. Could prove tricky.
The last issue I ran into was broadcasting events. I had originally set up the Fighter scene as a child of another Node2D, so a player node, for example, could have a script which handled input and called into Fighter to strike or block or move. This worked well enough, but when it came to detecting and broadcasting hit events, I found that selecting the overlapping areas with an area 2D (at the hit point) yielded the root nodes (i.e. player, npc, etc) and NOT the fighter nodes which could handle ‘hit’. I struggled in part because Godot does not allow one to attach multiple scripts to the same node. I didn’t want to put more logic into the fighting controller, but it didn’t seem graceful to select all the nodes of a given type and then seek the first child with name “Fighter”. The solution turned out to be flipping around the hierarchy. Instead of having PlayerNode -> FighterBody, I had FighterBody -> PlayerController. All on-screen fighters have this same root type which means I can simply have the animation call ‘strike’ and the event will propagate.
func strike():
for b in strike_area.get_overlapping_bodies():
if b.is_in_group(target_group) and b.has_method("hit"):
b.hit(self, strike_area, damage)
func hit(striker, damage_area, damage):
# TODO: Face correct direction.
hit_recovery_time_remaining = hit_recovery_time
animation_player.play("Hit_Front")
# TODO: Report the hit to child nodes.
All that comes together to make a nice striking system.