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Baby Moses

Artur

Dear Godot community,

I would like to introduce you to my project, which I have started about 2 weeks before Christmas 2019. It is a little top-down adventure that tells a short story about Baby Moses. You play it from the perspective of his sister who watches over him from a distance to see how he is doing.

The story briefly summarized:

The pharaoh enslaves the Jewish people and has the Israeli male babies killed because the Jews have become too big and therefore too powerful for him. So he wanted to prevent them from growing.

Because Moses' mother could no longer hide her baby, she built a basket made of reeds, pitch and earth resin. So she put him in the reeds on the bank of the water, but his sister (the player) should see from a distance how he was doing.

When Pharaoh's daughter discovered the baby, she felt Sorry with him. Then Moses' sister comes in and says: "Shall I go and call one of the Hebrew women who is nursing the child?"

So the baby and mother come together again, isn't that a great story? :)

Tasks of the player:

Collect reeds,
look for earth resin and pitch
Sneak past the Egyptian soldiers
speak to the residents

tools

I work a lot with Blender to create the pixel graphics This figure is still a placeholder.

Dear community, this project is still in progress, I am currently learning a lot from it and I am open to suggestions and ideas!

cybereality

That's really cute.

Artur

Creation of the tiles

Here you can see how I dealt with the tiles until I became familiar with them. After seeing that it worked well, I went on to the more creative work and developed further the colors and particle system in Blender. (more on this below) After the grass, I went one step further and started with the wall, which also includes a collision shape. The last picture here shows the current status (03 January 2020)

I recreated the tiles in Blender, set the camera and animated it so that the camera jumps from tile to tile. So I rendered one tile per frame. In order for the tiles to become seamless, I had to lengthen the shape a bit. This picture shows grass that was evenly distributed on the tiles using a particle system.

Tileset

I put the individual tiles into a tileset editor together. It was smal editor in the web browser. I'm not satisfied with this tool and can't even find the link to it again. So I'm looking for a comfortable tool. I would love to hear your suggestions.

Joystick on Touchscreen

It is very important to me that the game works on the smart phone. I definitely had to know whether the controls on the touchscreen is user-friendly.

It worked well with the mouse, but to test it on the touchscreen I had to export it.

It was also a success on the touchscreen. These advancements that I made here are fundamental and important for this project. I was very happy that I succeeded.

Gonkee's tutorial helped me, here is the link.

Mirjam

Mirjam is the sister of Moses and is controlled by the player. Like you see here, I've modeled her. next tasks are the colors / materials and the animations.

Dialog System

The dialogue system / quest system should play a major role. Since I am not a good programmer, this is unfortunately very difficult for me.

I look forward to your suggestions and maybe a link or two to a helpful source :)

cybereality

Nice job.

antigravityturtle

Nice concept. Looks like you have a good start.

Maybe this could be helpful for a dialog system: https://godotforums.org/discussion/20666/dialogue-designer-and-dialogue-system-for-godot-3

Artur

How do you eat an elephant?

Dear community, I'm currently stuck and overwhelmed. Programming is not easy for me, even though I have already gone down to the"Gameboy level". I got stuck in the code and have to take a few steps back. I have to think again about what is really important and how I can achieve it in small, feasible steps. I have restructured my code and the folders. That brings a lot. Next, I would like a comfortable StateMashine for more order and clarity.

Dialogue System & Dialogue Designer

I bought it and integrated it into this project. Had little trouble but the developer, radmatt, is very friendly and could help me. Thanks for the suggestion @antigravityturtle

I believe that if I have installed the DialogueSystem correctly and understand how to use it, I have overcome a hurdle and can finally give my game the depth it needs.

Wall tiles

![] (Https://i.imgur.com/CJBWONG.gif) As you can see in the gif, I have the problem that the figure standing behind the wall is not covered. I was considering solving the problem with a shader, but I'm not sure if that's the best way. Maybe one or the other of you has more experience with this. I look forward to hearing from you.

I have more to tell, but more on that later

Megalomaniak

For the wall tile "problem" you might want to see if the y-sort node can solve it for you.

Hippo

To solve the wall issue you could split the pillar in half and place each half on separate tilesets. If the top half of the pillar is below the character on the hierarchy then the character will appear behind it, while if the bottom half of the pillar is above the character on the hierarchy then the character will appear in front of it. Hope this helps!

Artur

Thank you @Hippo, I will also think about this possibility :)

@Megalomaniak thank you for the tip, its a usefull node, but something doesn't seem right. The wall in the tilemap, in the Y-minus area is above the player and everything in the plus area is below the player.

Megalomaniak

@Artur said: @Megalomaniak thank you for the tip, its a usefull node, but something doesn't seem right. The wall in the tilemap, in the Y-minus area is above the player and everything in the plus area is below the player.

Notice that it works according to the objects origins/pivot points. Note sure, but I guess it might not work too well with tilemaps as a result though.

If your walls weren't tilemaps(say only floors/ground was) it would probably work though.

Artur

Ysort node & Tilemap

As @Megalomaniak says, it works around object origin. Since I moved the sprite from the player by half (-64/2 = -32) it works. Thank you very much :) Later I adjusted it a little to the position of the feet. I would have preferred the tileset to be moved, but unfortunately that was not so easy. Shape offset only moves the first shape, not the entire set. i could move the collision shape with a script, which i will try another time. I'm grateful for any little help, especially when it comes to programming :) With the help of a shader, a dark area is shown where the character is covered by something. So you don't lose the character if it is behind a tree, for example.

Mirjam

Here you can see that I have colored the character. The first time, she became a blonde girl. Usually Jews are not blonde and the blonde hair also emphasizes the character too much. It has to be a character that fits the story I want to tell here. It should be a poor, inconspicuous girl, the brown hair emphasizes it more

When I'm not in front of my laptop, of course I have to have at least a sheet of paper and a ballpoint pen with me :) ... then I can use the minute or two to draw.

cybereality

Very cool.

Artur

Dialogue System

On Saturday afternoon Juppi wrote me from the German Godot Discrord Channel. It came unexpectedly, because mine request was already one day old and I thought it was lost in the chat process.

He offered me his help. Smoke rose from our heads, more from his head than mine. After 2 hours of screen broadcasting we finally got it working. It was really very nice of him, I discovered and learned several things. I appreciate his help. Thanks Juppi!

Everything I have learned so far, I have learned from the community.

Now it's all about understanding it and cleaning up the code before I can move on to the deeper story.

Artur

In the last few days I have been struggling with websites. If you are dealing with something like that, you don't have much desire to continue the fight with GDScript. Therefore I have continued with the tiles again. I rounded off the tiles a bit. They're more organic now, less square.
I understand the particle system in Blender better now. While testing I noticed how important the road is for the visual guidance. As a player, you tend to follow the road, whether with your character or with your eyes. I noticed that it feels awkward when the character hits a wall and is slowed down.

But a good level design is also necessary to let the player decide whether to go left or right. And if he does run into a dead end, he should at least find a little something in it so that he doesn't regret getting lost.

#Dialogue System Unfortunately, the Dialogue System can no longer be seen on the mobile phone. I wonder if it has something to do with the inputmap. I have to bypass the keyboard buttons with touchscreen buttons.

dwarf

Nice art! Good luck ;)

cybereality

Welcome to the forum, @dwarf

Artur

#NPC with State Mashine the npc has a timer that selects a certain direction in the state mahine. So the NPC moves in a random direction or he makes a short break. Only that they are still a little blind but the whole picture is already more alive In the meantime, I have done small programming exercises, which has improved me. I'll keep you informed.

Artur

#walk cycle To make animation easier for me, I have designed a boy. He has no complicated clothes and no long hair. his leg gets too long when it goes back, I'll correct it another time. The animation is played a bit faster in the game than in the gif here. Made the statemashine a bit cleaner and use it to play the new animations. Under the feet is a particle system to represent the dust it raises while running.

I thank you for every thumbs up!

Artur

I am taking part in a German game developement showcase and had to create a video for it. I even translated the subtitles into english for you.

Here are the answers to questions that have arisen through the video: * Why don't you make the game in 3D ? The characters are sprites, not 3D directly because the game is designed for mobile devices. I hope that I can handle a lot of performance problems with it. Also, I am a better graphic designer than a programmer, so I want to stay in 2D.

will there be a quiz on Bible verses? No, I don't build in a query of bible verses :) You should learn a lot of the story through dialogues with the people you meet in this adventure.
how bible-proof do you have to stay? The story will have a biblical thread, only that I take the liberty of decorating it with side quests. I will try not to include elements that don't support the story. I wish that this game would reward the player for doing good.

Artur

Hello dear community, I haven't written here for a long time and unfortunately there are no great pictures today. That is because I have concentrated mainly on programming. I have also learned a lot, which I will explain here roughly. In practice it is a bit more complicated than it sounds here, that's why I needed my time.

add commit push

Git secures my progress because I have to experiment a lot before I achieve anything. from now on every step is documented! B)

Git is a recommendation from a friend of mine who might help me with programming, he has also composed some music for the game. I hope we can find the time together to develop Baby Moses further.

Program Structure

Character
- player
- npc

Character is the parent ,and contains the state machine. Player and npc are children and contain their states. The player gets its events through the keyboard, the npc through a timer. For example, the timer determines when the npc should change to the desired state. Through this structure I can split the code so that I store the general properties in character.gd and the specific ones in player.gd or npc.gd

State Machine

The state machine contains the states, but also events. The events are triggered by a keystroke on the player or by a timer on the npc. These main mechanics and this state machine I got from gdquest the dialogue system from radmatt and hopefully I will put them together soon :)

#story structure in building the story i definitely want to tell what the bible says. But I allow myself to include little quests in between and around it. That way the story is not only told, but the player also has something to do.