Legend Of Zelda Series - 03 - Menu, Screens, and Bombs

 

    I started out this project trying to run, so this week I had to take a step backwards and watch a Godot tutorial. I wasn’t making very good progress while trying to bash my head against Godot. So I watched some tutorials from Brackeys. This video is really well done and really helped me get into the whole Godot process. Since watching this video, I have been able to make much better progress through the process.

    The first thing I decided to do after watching that tutorial was to drop the convoluted inheritance that I was trying to achieve. I don’t think that this had to do anything with Brackey. I find that the Godot environment it is difficult to flip between all the scripts to manage and consult the inheritance. Whereas code editors like VS Code or InteliJ allows you to have multiple tabs and multiple code editors open, making it very easy to see the larger picture. So I refactored all the scenes and scripts into one for each entity, and the project became so much easier to manage

    The next thing BIG thing for me was to get the screen setup so that I could test on more than Godot’s default grey screen. So I setup a tileset and tilemap. This was really interesting to me because I haven’t really worked with these concepts before. I love that I can draw the world like this and already have collision boxes setup. Going into this project I really had no idea how I was going to put the world onto the screen. I was also able to import the world map as a sprite, and use as an underlay for drawing out the map tiles, this improved map drawing process dramatically.

The map so far. The bright screens are the screens I have painted in so far. The rest is the underlay.

    I spent quite a bit of time working on getting the menu screen switch working. Asking AI for help is really what cost me so much time, it kept sending me down paths that just didn't work for what I wanted to achieve for the menu sliding effect. After doing some googling, I wound up using a tween to achieve the correct effect. I'm super happy with the way it turned out.

 

    I have also setup a git project to manage the growing ToDo list of tasks. I use Gitea as my day to day git repository. I love how easy it was to set up and get running on my own server in my own domain, and I can still maintain public access to it for exposing to the internet. I don’t mind Github, but I don’t like having all my data on a Microsoft server. I try to host my own services and keep my data internal.

    The next thing I worked on was implementing the first item, the BOMB! 💣 Getting the sprite loaded was fairly simple. Getting the bomb to disappear and play the bomb sound effect was a bit harder, but I used Brackeys tutorial and applied the same principle as he did for the coin pickup, that worked well. Then I had to make the bomb counter label update. I decided to go with a autoloaded global script to house item counters, although I would have preferred to have found a way to just access each scene. This was the fastest and easiest way to get it working though. I might choose to autoload the Link scene instead since that is really the holder of all of those  types variables and that scene will also be moving between scenes such as overworld, cave, and dungeon. We will see what happens with that.

The bomb’s script so far and the logic to handle the incrementing the amount with the variable mac values:

The Global’s script so far:

    My next semester begins in the next few days. Five more classes wooo :) This will slow down progress on Zelda, but I will still be here. I might post more school related stuff for the next few months. One of my classes is Computer Security using Kali Linux and I am super excited for that.