Coding a fire attack that crawls across the ground

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Coding a fire attack that crawls across the ground

mirai

I've been puzzling out the logic behind an enemy/player attack and it feels like I'm almost there but I can't quite figure out how to implement the last little bit. It's a fire that moves along the ground similar to attacks in lots of other 2D games. I made a little illustration to show what I'm trying to do.

The fire scene with its animation and collision detection is saved as a PackedScene. The way it moves (in theory anyway) is:
1.) The first fire is spawned.
2.) When it hits the midway point in its animation cycle (or a timer fires, either should work I think), it spawns a second copy of the fire instance a set distance in front of itself.
3.) Fire #2 hits the midpoint of its animation cycle/timer fires and spawns Fire #3 a set distance in front of itself.
4 & 5.) Fire #1 completes its animation cycle and is deleted. Fire #2 and #3 follow the same pattern up until it hits a maximum number of fires. It should also stop if it hits a wall or other obstacle, but that shouldn't be too hard to implement once I get the basic behavior up and running.

It all makes perfect sense in my head and I can't see why it wouldn't work with what little I know about Godot, but I can't quite figure out how to get all the parts working together. Mostly how to get it to sequentially spawn new copies evenly spaced out. I think I might need to study how enemy spawners work and apply a similar logic here, but I'm not 100% sure. Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!

Lethn

For this kind of thing to have everything work neatly you should implement extremely fast delays with a simple float timer, that would be my advice but other than that I think you've mostly got it figured out. I've done this myself by the way even with stuff like entering/exiting vehicles in order to prevent the code from executing on top of each other which happens with execution order quite often if you're not careful. I'm talking something like 0.01 seconds by the way, very very quick, but adjust according to your liking and how it makes the game feel, you'd be surprised how much this makes a difference. Bearing in mind with just about any engine if you don't implement this it will spawn every frame automatically.

mirai

Lethn
I've been experimenting with it this evening and you're right, a timer works MUCH better than beating my head against the Animation Player trying to work that out. I just treated the fires as temporary damage areas with a sprite, animation, and hitbox, then spawn them with a very short duration timer in between each spawn event and an offset value fed into the spawner to spread them out. It seems a little messy atm but it works and it's a starting point to refine it more. Thanks!