State of Project KW (10 June 2023)

Yeah so I'm gonna do this now. Weekly updates on where the game is currently at, and where I plan to take it as I progress.

Git cleanup

I've been cleaning up the repository by committing all the unstaged files that weren't being tracked, so now GitHub is completely up to date with my working copy, and CI is able to run unit tests quite well. I've also decided to drop develop branch as I've done in a lot of my projects lately. I've decided the way to structure my repos from now on is to have main branch which contains the latest bleeding-edge version of the code (and also must be compilable, even if it contains bugs). Various features and mechanics are then built in their own branches (feature/gravity_shift for example), and once the feature/mechanic is stable enough, it gets merged to main. As for specific version releases, well that's what tags are for. Once main is at a point where it's stable enough to release, I tag with v#.#.# and a GitHub Workflow automatically creates a new release at that point.

Map reading/writing

I've also spent the past couple of days implementing the map spec I wrote up some time ago. Essentially, I now have a system that can read and write custom .pak files (files which contain map data that can be loaded dynamically). This will open up the possibility down the line to add UGC support. Either mod.io, or Steam Workshop, I haven't decided yet. Depends where I publish the game. That's a decision for later.

At any rate, since that system is now implemented, I can work on more game mechanics.

So what mechanic is first?

The core player movement is working brilliantly. The ball seamlessly rolls around the map, over edges and up walls. The next step now is to create a realistic and functional jump. This is where I got stuck last time, and this is gonna fucking suck so wish me luck.