Entry 21

Spring Break (Week 8) Worklog

yes I'm working through the break

 

I do want to note that on top of the gamedev work I've been doing I also have been working on more general self-promotional material. I am lumping this work in with the project as I would like to get a proper portfolio site up and running that I can link to as well as business cards and other goodies at the showcase. I didn't time any of this work as I tend to work at the stuff in-between projects sporadically but I feel it's noteworthy enough to mention here.

3/11/25

Because I'm starting to get into cutscene/load triggers I decided to put together a quick animation of the subway doors closing and opening. I might recolor the assets sometime in the future once I have the subway textured to better match, but for now they're mildly ominous purple doors

This only took about an hour and 30 minutes, a lot of that was messing around with color gradients while making the 2D assets before just saying screw it we can change it later.

The other animation-related thing I decided to work on for the next almost two hours was getting the player's animations to properly play with the movement inputs. I've got the basic forwards and backwards movement working fine (for a bit... until it somehow broke??? so gotta fix that lucky me) but the jump is my current trouble that I'll continue working at tomorrow. I also still need to get them to flip when they face left/right.

3/12/25

2 hours and 30 minutes in for today and little to no progress on the animations. The movement is working again but my jump is still broken at the moment. My code is that of spaghetti admittedly so I'm having to go in and mess around with the player movement controls in hopes of getting something working.

3/13/25

Well today's been way more productive as I actually worked out a lot of the problems I was having with the animation controller in only about an hour and 30 minutes! yay!

We've got full movement!!!!! The jump is still a bit weird as right now I only have the fall animation set in the animator, but with things properly working now hopefully

After this I took a break and then worked for another 2 and a half hours, totaling my work time today to 5 hours. My second work session was spent getting the jump to work better and while I have made progress in how the jump and double jump trigger its still not fully there. Hopefully next session.  

3/14/25

The first 20 minutes of today's work session was spent tying up most of the loose ends I had with the jump animations, here's where we're at!

 

Excuse the lag spike in the gif, but basically the jump and double jump play at the correct times now and the fall animation activates for both falling from a jump and falling from a ledge. There's only one bug left with the animations that I know of and that's the fact that sometimes if you press the forward and back input rapidly while falling, Doc will get stuck in the fall animation even if they're grounded until they move again. I'm thinking to solve this I'll just have some float that checks the player's velocity on the y axis and if it's at 0 then they go to the idle...? I'm still trying to figure out exactly what triggers them to get stuck honestly. Though with that said I am just going to put a pin in this for now and move onto the other programming things I need to tackle and this isn't anything game-breaking.

...And turns out that would be it for my in-engine work today. Wasn't feeling the best, but in exchange I made more progress on portfolio site stuff.

3/18/25

I don't have anymore updates for Farer Dreamer itself at the moment, but I wanted to show the back of the business card I've been chipping away at as I finished that up tonight and it features Doc amidst some of my other critters from other projects of mine!

I'll have these at my table for grabs/to hand out at the showcase. I'd love to have some other Farer Dreamer specific trinkets like maybe stickers or small prints of the concept art but we'll see, the actual project comes first haha