Syncing turned out to be fairly easy to implement once I decided how to approach it. I had a bit of trouble getting the character to move with the platform she was standing on, but that was mostly just because my approach was flawed, and once I changed everything to just use velocity values instead of some of the weird direct modifications I’d been trying it all worked just fine.
After that, I wanted to come up with a system for moving these kinds of special platforms, so I made two: One is a very simple behavior for moving smoothly in a sine-wave shaped motion on either or both axes over a period of time, suitable for any kind of repeating smooth up-and-down, side-to-side, circular, or figure-eight movement pattern. The other is based on providing a set of movement vectors and the amount of time to move each distance in (rather than a rate of movement), along with easing values between 0 and 1 to handle how much acceleration/deceleration each step should have.
Now that those behaviors are complete, I’m working on getting attacks working using the collision and interaction methods I’ve established over the last couple weeks. The attack part should be fairly easy, though probably a bit tedious since I’ll need to create a separate entity prototype for each style of attack, but before I can test it I’ll have to construct a test enemy to work with, which may take a bit of effort. Maybe I can temporarily steal some sprites from another game to get that up and running.
Oh, the other major thing that will need to be figured out is how to handle entity destruction. That is, right now an entity can be deleted, but they just blink out of existence, which is pretty unsatisfying. I need to figure out how I’ll be handling dying animations and other such effects.
It’s a bit discouraging to think that this time last year I was releasing the very first rough footage of the game and how little it’s changed visually since then, but I think a lot has changed under the hood. For the next update I’ll probably go back and look over what I’ve accomplished during the past year, which will either make me really depressed or slightly mollified. We’ll see!
Also, I know I’ve been super bad about updating with non-devblog content for the past month or so. I’m hoping to get back in the habit soon. It’s just really easy to get sidetracked. Sorry!