Spent some time over the last few days working on that Godot game, mainly building new mechanics. This evening I started working on an interceptor, something that would jump out of the quicksand in order to disrupt the player’s jump. Here’s an example of how they look in the test bed:

And yeah, they’re pretty much a carbon-copy of the Podoboos from Mario. But I think there’s a reason they’re still making an appearance in games, years after their debut in Super Mario Brothers. They’re quite a versatile enemy, making jumping challenges a bit more interesting than just seeing whether the player the clear a gap. Plus they’re reasonably easy to make.

Another mechanic taken from Mario was a switch that revealed coins and tiles for a limited time. Hit it once and the child nodes of this “timed_limited_visible” scene are displayed and activated for 10 seconds, before they disappear again:

Much like the blue P switch this mechanic takes inspiration from, the switch can only be activated once. So it may be only useful for bonuses and areas the player can afford to miss.

I had to do some special handling for nested TileMap nodes, since the player could still collide with them even when they’re hidden. How I solved this was nothing too spectacular: basically I just walk the child tree looking for TileMap instances, and when encountering one, just enabling or disabling the first layer:

func _show_and_activate_children():
    visible = true
    process_mode = Node.PROCESS_MODE_INHERIT
    for tm in find_children("*", "TileMap", false):
        tm.set_layer_enabled(0, true)

func _hide_and_deactivate_children():
    visible = false
    process_mode = Node.PROCESS_MODE_DISABLED
    for tm in find_children("*", "TileMap", false):
        tm.set_layer_enabled(0, false)

Building these elements was fun, but the main problem is that I’m struggling to come up with a centrepiece mechanic for level 2-1, something that defines the level in some way. I have an idea for level 2-2 — this world is set in a desert so I’m hoping to introduce a thirst mechanic — but level 2-1 I’m hoping to keep relatively plain so as to avoid overwhelming the player with too many new things. The fear is to avoid making it little more than what the player encountered in world 1: a series of jumping puzzles over pits. Sure, that’s pretty much the entire game in a way, but some variety would be nice.

I’m hoping one of these mechanics could help here. I guess I’ll find one once I’ve start seriously building the level.