Day/Week 4: Basic Environment Collision

It turns out it's very easy to get a basic 2D platformer running in Godot. Getting it to actually be good, and have a polished and satisfying feeling while moving through the world is another thing.

The different slope lengths in this basic debug level let you experiment with the way the character’s collider interacts with the ground at various angles. You can run over really steep slopes, as long as you are going fast enough! Neko’s max speed is currently set to 5000, so if you just hold down right, she eventually zooms off the edge.

AnimationPlayer

Before I add any more art, I needed to refactor the whole animation system to use AnimationPlayer instead of AnimatedSprite2D. With the AnimationPlayer I should later be able to use a state graph visualizer to add transitions between different states.

So I started trying to learn how to add my sprites to these “tracks”. It was not the best experience. I spent some hours figuring out why this walk looked so weird. Even using AI tools, the official documentation, and old-fashioned forum searching, I couldn’t find answers to the questions that arose. How do you change the length of each frame? Why is there a horizontal line connecting my frames sometimes? Eventually I realized the answer to the latter question is that the editor draws a horizontal line connecting frames that are duplicates of the same sprite. Through trial and error, I eventually figured out that the looping modes and interpolation options were set wrong.

Next week's agenda: jumping to platforms.