Day 5 & 6

Author’s Note: I actually wrote this over the course of Day 6, so it might feel a bit weird and disjointed. A bit back and forth. I’m keeping it as-is for now. Maybe it makes it more interesting to read, maybe it’s just more confusing. I’ll leave comments open so let me know how you feel about the format!

On day 5, I managed to remember that I had picked up an audio fx and music bundle a while back. It even came with a Godot (and Unreal and Unity) plugin to load up the music this company prepared in a particular way that allows the user to play varying levels of intensities based on a float-based slider. It’s pretty neat. I even found a music that fit the story concept I had in mind.

But now it’s day 6 and I’m only starting work on the first level. It’s not going to be too complicated, but I wanted to use a hexagonal grid. Most assets aren’t built with that in mind. Worse, the one I wanted to use may not be aligned to be used in a tilemap anyway. A bit of searching turned up that Godot doesn’t have hex shape support for GridMap. Either I do this all in 2D or just go with a square grid.

With some thoughts and trial and error, I figured out a setup for the gridmap that allowed for me to lay down hex tiles the way I needed them to. The problem is if I want to put down anything on them, I need to have 3 variations of the same model, but at 60 and 120 degree rotation. The current, thrown together pipeline isn’t complex, though. I just import the model into Blender (since the model assets I need to modify didn’t come with the source file), duplicate them, rotate, apply the rotation, and do it again for the second set.

Whether or not I actually need this, I’m not sure yet. It’s good to know there are workarounds, even if they’re not ideal.

I can also generate the “interactive” nodes I need on the hex tiles using the Gridmap too. map_to_local() to the rescue, and a little bit of vector math 😉

While I haven’t gotten any of the actual interaction parts done, I’m actually happier with the progress I’ve made. Hopefully this will help me shake off the self-doubt I’ve been feeling and really hit the ground running for the next couple of days! I can say, doing this solo have been a rough ride. Even if I don’t manage to make it to the end with a fully playable game, at least I put in the effort and have learned some valuable lessons along the way! Lessons that should make future game jams using Godot easier.