I don't think there's ever been a game engine that I haven't fought with to get what I want. To achieve some specific task.

Creating a minimap in Godot 3.5.x proved to be harder than I initially thought. I credit that to the fact that I just don't know how many nodes work extensively. I almost always expect that if I follow a tutorial... then the rest would work no problem.

Well... that wasn't the case. Which is funny considering that I have made minimaps with godot before.

Anyway, this took me a couple of days of trying different things to see what I would ultimately stick with. So far I'm pleased. This looks like it will give me the best functionality out of what I want... so I'm sticking to it.

I had to get rid of the smoth scrolling of the camera when transitioning to rooms because it kinda doesn't work too well when rooms come in all sorts of configurations.

That's okay for now. It doesn't make the experience less awesome.

Oh and I decided to go with a peculiar level design. As much as like randomly generated levels in rougelikes, I also like to have control over very specific experiences. Especially for this game. That means I want to make sure that rooms have a specific patterns (I'm sorry if that doesn't make much sense).

But to break it down:

• I have created different room layouts that are sort of lego pieces.

• I dynamically generate a level using different arrangements of these room layouts. The number of rooms per level and the connectivity of the rooms can be loaded from config files. And I can just randomize the level based on a stored config

• This allows for a sort of spelunky type level generation system mixed with enter the gungeon of pre-defined rooms. And hopefully with the art-style being somewhat simplistic, will allow for variation per room-layout.

I guess that's it for now. I feel like one of the hardest parts of this is somewhat taken care of. I needed to envision 90% of all levels complete based on level design style.

I believe that I'm at a place where I can see that as being a possibility now.

I want to start working on enemies next. My progress-method is to sort of have at least 1-of-each-kind during development. So at least one weapon. At least one perk. At least one level. At least one pickup. At least one enemy. At least one boss. At least one game loop. Then I will only focus on adding more and more from there.

A bit of a far cry from how I used to do things in the past where I just made stuff up as I went.

Anyway, novel over.

Until next time