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2025-04-18 Jumping and Bug

published: Fri 18 April 2025

tags:

Clerical update: In the interest of having more interesting blog posts, I'll only be posting one devlog per week, regardless of how many changes I make.

This week, I added jumping, jump-through/fall-through platforms, and a very basic bug enemy that follows you around. You can see the jump-through and bug enemy behavior in the GIF below:

bug following character

As part of making the jump-through platforms, I discovered that my z-layering for the grass clutter and platforms was insufficient, so I switched to y-sorting. As a consequence, I had to fiddle a lot with the character image offsets/transforms, so there may be some unforeseen bugs in the animations, but I haven't seen any yet.

The bug (static image and bug design graciously provided by Squish) will follow the player until they are a certain distance away. The bug's current AI state is displayed in a text label below the bug.

Nitty-gritty detail: To allow easier control over showing/hiding debug info (like the bug's AI state), I implemented a DebugComponent, which can dynamically show/hide another sibling node based on the config. This'll require some expansion later, but is a much cleaner way of handling this "everything needs to show some debug info" than how I was handling it in Wyrmtender.

Next up is some more hostile AI and the ability to attack (and be attacked by) the bug.