Moving Ahead, One Feature At A Time

I'm gradually reintroducing features that the old 2D version had, as well as what the Unreal Engine version had. While 2D was initially simpler to work with, due to being superficially less complex, eventually it came to feel like I was jumping through more hoops in 2D to accomplish things that are seemingly easier in 3D.

Animations are an interesting example. Animating a 3D character is actually simpler in some ways.  I can grab animations from Mixamo, or use something like Cascadeur, and then just play them in Godot's animation player, after packing them into the model in Blender. Conversely, 2D animation requires creating a sequence of 2D images to represent the individual frames of your animation, which can be quite time consuming. In fact, Animations were a part of my original decision that it was time to move to 3D. It was that move to 3D which led me to spend a month learning Unreal Engine.

After Unreal didn't work out for me, I came back to the warm embrace of Godot, but this time I was committed to 3D, which hadn't been Godot's strong point in the past. I'm working with Godot 4.1.3 stable at the moment, and I can honestly say that Godot is now quite strong in 3D.

Today I added a feature that wasn't in any of the previous versions: animated damage numbers! I've seen it in other games, and it was something I really wanted to have, and with Godot it was fairly easy to add, with a small bit of help from a tutorial.

Next up, I'll be attempting to recreate the HUD from the Unreal version.