More on that Godot project today. Finally bit the bullet and started working on proper backdrops. I’ve leaving the artwork until later (i.e. I’m procrastinating), today was all about the mechanics, trying to get parallax scrolling working. Fortunately Godot has built-in nodes to make this easy, although I did have to upgrade Godot to 4.5.

This is my first cut, some simple colour banding to represent sky and sand in one of the desert levels:

Auto-generated description: A pixel-art game interface shows a character in armour on a blocky terrain with a blue sky background and floating coins.

These two layers were added to the scene as Parallax2D nodes, each with a single Sprite child. Positioning the sprites was a little tricky. Godot suggests placing them at the origin, but what I didn’t understand was that the actual position of the sprite depends a lot on the scroll scale of the Parallax2D node. I added the sky layer without changing the scroll position and it took me a while before I discovered that it was appearing below the camera. Only after reducing the scroll scale to about 0.1 did it start showing up in the viewport (one nice thing about Godot 4.5 is that the “play scene” window includes debug options, allowing you to hijack the camera and move it around the scene).

Auto-generated description: A game development interface is displayed, featuring a pixelated game scene with water and blocks being edited in an application, likely Godot Engine.

I will need to introduce some detail in the backdrop layers soon. The bands are too simple and may induce some vertigo when the player is ascending to high platforms. Plus, it just looks boring. Not that they’re meant to be eye-catching but something a little more interesting would be nice.

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