Grasslands and Dungeons - TLR October Monthly Update #2

It's time for another Monthly Update on The Last Root's development!

Before reading we'd appreciate it if you followed us on.......

Steam (WISHLIST HERE)    - Twitter -     Gamejolt

To the Update ->

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Art

A quick little art update! My lesson learned for September was: don’t keep all your art on a flash drive. Mine broke and despite our best efforts to revive it, it didn’t make it. Thankfully, most of the files had already been sent over and I was able to restore a few of my most recent files, but I still lost a lot which is more frustrating than anything.  

After that, I worked on the button prompts for the fully coded controller update (details in the programming section).

Then I finally really began the valley area. Here, I finally discovered Aseprite’s tile mapping feature (fully two years late) which made things much, much easier.

I used it for not only the grass tiles but also for the tall grass and the river.

I got to do a little bit of character design: a cute family of daisy NPCs. I also wrote their dialogue, so despite being pretty much minor, these characters really came alive for me.

The last thing I worked on was the factory, an instrumental part of the gameplay. After mapping it out, I drew the rooms (again using tilemaps for the conveyor belts).

 -Asiyah 

Programming

Hello, it's Maryam, here's my update on the programming side of things. 

Input Update 

To kick off this month, I started working on the full controller update and improved instructions given to the player to provide clearer tutorials.

This included: 

• Revamping any awkward controls ( For example, the battle scene used enter to advance dialogue, while the rest of the game used space. This has now been fixed and one button is tied to all dialogue in-game)
• Adding full controller support 
• adding the ability to use any controller of your choice 
• adding the ability to play the entire game with just the keyboard 
• adding in the new art for all the inputs

Rogi’s new Assist move

 In battle, certain battlers have the ability to assist when an enemy is targeting their teammates. So far I have coded Eugene’s which consists of a minigame that tests your timing. This month I finally got around to coding Rogi’s. Rogi, being a defensive type, has the same minigame as Eugene. However, she also has an additional minigame for her second type. If you time the first minigame correctly, you will have a chance to counter and attack the goon in her second minigame.

It's still a WIP but I should return to it later.

Day and night cycle  - Overworld Enemies 

The game now has a day-and-night cycle! This is important as it will affect many aspects of the game including, the battle scene,  enemies's behavior, quest,  some plant types, and lighting in the game.  (Along with this new system we also added two new status effects which we will be showcasing on Twitter and Gamejolt soon)

I also refactored the enemy's overworld code and tweaked their behavior. The enemies were originally getting stuck in collisions, bumping into each other, and only patrolling around. Now the enemies will go around collisions in their way, sleep at night, and sit on objects that I have grouped as seats. (New AI will be showcased on Twitter, as the file is too large for here)

A New Area

Starting a new area was really exciting as we've been doing the desert for a long while now. So far we have the battle area done for the valley.  For the battle area, the biggest thing I had to code was the sneak mechanic.

Getting the grass to overlay the player was tricky at first because I had to figure out masking through trial and error. Thankfully Godot light2d node has a handy masking option that made this possible. The last step was to add a shader that darkened the edges and reduced the enemy's detection boxes. The only thing left is a crouching animation and some tweaking to the grass overlay node.

(While the light2D node covers the masking, I attached a raycast to the overlay node that helps calculate the distance between the player and the center of the grass path, from there we can tell the overlay where it needs to position on the player's body so that it won't clip in and out.)

Lastly, I played around with some parallax effects for up in the mountains.

Last but not least…Dungeons!

From the early days of planning The Last Root, we always knew we wanted a strong puzzle aspect in our game, like seen in Pokemon Gym/caves, Zelda games, Mario, and many more.

Besides the occasional puzzles in other parts of the game, we decided on the factories being our version of dungeons. The factories have always played a huge role in the game's story, so it works well.

 I coded different boxes.

 Pushable ones, breakable ones, and ones that drop loot!

There's also a key card. These will be used to open the doors and access elevators.

I created a node that will carry sprites around the different conveyor belts to make the place look more alive.

 And to end things off, in game, different characters will have different abilities so I worked on Rogi's overworld ability that will be of use in some of the puzzles. (guess you’ll just have to play it and try it out when it's ready :D )

Thanks for tuning into this month's dev blog, this was an exciting month for the game. Cya in the next one!👋

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