So naturally, I've decided that devlog entries would be a weekly thing, not a per-day entry.

HAHAHAHAHHA...cool joke, man.....overly optimistic Past Baftis is overly optimistic.

Why hello, ladies and gents. Back at it with an update on how the game is going.

So I've been struggling quite a bit with working on the game and actually have a work-life balance thing going on. Clearly one of these didn't work out, but I did manage to work on the game more.

Turns out motivation is a thing and got demotivated in the past few weeks. A vacation (of all things) managed to ease the struggle. Turns out that's what I needed.

So one of the things I've worked on is redesigning the canyon part of the level. There's nothing really wrong with the current version of the canyon, but visualizing the game when falling asleep churns out some pretty inpiring things. One of those inspiring things was the canyon part. Why? I wanted/needed a level where things could get really twitch-y and reflex based and really fast paced. Kind of like Sonic games, but in first person and with jumping. And one of those areas seems to pop up time and again: the canyon.

Now this turned me on big time, and as I started to implement this, I came across what I initially though was a bug. So, I have the jump-pad, right? And whenever you overlap with the jump-pad, the character flings in the air (on the Z axis) and you can go pretty much either way after that. Well, I did try to adapt this jump pad to a monkey bar kinda thing (the pole in DOOM eternal) Where you fling forwards. Well, that monkey bar had a problem: see, the idea is to fling the player forward on the Y-axis of the monkey bar. But lo and behold, the monkey bar does fling you on the Y-axis....of the world!!! So, I though "OK, this is clearly a bug", and went about to fix it.

Turns out that this isn't a bug. By using LaunchCharacter nodes, the script tells the character to jump on the Y axis of the world, so you can't use relative rotation on the LaunchCharacter node. What this also means is that if I want to fling the character in a certain direction, I'll have to manually input the force on the axes I want that character to fling to. And my brain went "UUUUUUUGH!!?!?!?!" So, for every single directional jump pad/monkey bar that I want in the game, I have to make manual adjustments...."UUUUUUUGH!!?!?!?!" Thank God I don't have to do this on the jump pads that just fling you up, otherwise, I think I might've gotten insane.

So yeah, fun times, guys...really fun times.

Anyway. For the time being, work on the Forest level is on hold. I've completely ran out of inspiration for it and will touch it once inspiration hits...or I'll visualize it before sleeping again. I'll leave you with only 2 screenshots, since it took a collosal amount of time to get the sequence right.

That's it for now, ladies and gents. See you in the next post. Buhbye.