Devlog

Finally added some checkpoints to level 1-3. Also added some animated water as a new type of hazard. The asset pack I’m using came with a single “wave” tile. I used Aseprite to shift that across 4 cells and configured it as an animation in the tile set. I was planning to add some background waves too, but that made it a little too busy and hard to discern. Less is more here.

October 14, 2025 9:51pm

Leon Mika

Devlog

Screenshots

A small devlog entry today. Just painting the level, adding background tiles and kill-zones. I also added a frame around the lift door, just to define it a little. Discovered that it’s probably best not to have sprites with non-even dimensions. It makes positioning them a little awkward, resulting in fractional offsets. I elected to include a transparent row at the top of the frame sprite, just to avoid this.

October 13, 2025 10:02pm

Leon Mika

Devlog

Screenshots

Bit more on lifts in Godot today. Re-engineered how the whole thing works: now everything is driven by the stationary lift doors. Each door has a reference to a lift and a target door. This makes the lift carriage itself rather passive: it will continue to reparent the player as before, but it no longer needs to track activations or have animating doors of it’s own. The doors just tell it where and when to go.

This has got proper targeting working so that a lift can now move between a pair of doors. It also allows for the player to call for the lift when it’s not positioned at the doors already. There are a few more dependencies amongst the various entities, but I think it makes for a more robust system.

September 30, 2025 11:14pm

Leon Mika

Devlog

Small change to the thirst mechanic for my Godot project. Switched from discrete thirst levels to a single timer that will tick down if the player is thirsty. This allowed for a change to how I indicate this to the player, replacing text messages that’ll be displayed at each thirst level with a gauge that shows up on the HUD.

I thought that the messages would be enough, but after playing through with them, they turned out to be more of a hindrance. They didn’t communicate the player’s thirst level well enough: they show up for a few seconds, then disappear, leaving the player to wonder how much time they have. This information is now always present with the gauge. Plus, I think it gives more of a sense of urgency, in that a gauge that’s constantly ticking down will encourage the player to play a little faster in order to reach the next water bottle before they perish from thirst.

September 28, 2025 12:09pm

Leon Mika

Devlog

Screenshots

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:

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).

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.

September 27, 2025 12:02pm

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Leon Mika

Devlog

Screenshots

Small DevLog update today. Continuing to work on that Godot game. I got the bulk of the mechanics of level 2-1 built (it still needs dressing up), and I spent this evening mainly just play-testing it, and tweaking it. I think I may need to get someone else to play-test it though, just to make sure it’s not too hard. It’s significantly long, coming in at 10,560 units horizontally, and given how many new mechanics are involved, I’m a little worried about the difficulty curve. But I am happy about the mix of elements I do have. It doesn’t feel boring, which was the concern I had. There are some timing challenges, and I the pacing across the level feels fine. But I really should convince someone else to try it out.

September 23, 2025 11:10pm

Leon Mika

Devlog

Ah, MacOS’s locked-down nature strikes again! Was testing the CI/CD build for Dequoter and after downloading the artefact and attempting to open it, I got this warning message:

Turn’s out it was being quarantined by MacOS, and these instructions resolved the issue.

The binaries not notarised so I wasn’t expecting it to work out of the box. I was hoping that it would do that thing where the app will be listed in settings and I can allow it to launch from there, but I guess there’s something about where this file came from that was too much from MacOS. Ah well, I can live with this for the short term.

September 7, 2025 11:14am

Leon Mika

Devlog

Screenshots

Starting to work on the background tiles. This is what I have so far. I hope it’s not too busy or distracting.

September 3, 2025 10:27pm

Leon Mika

Devlog

Screenshots