Puzzle Game Devlog

This time, our tiny game had to be a puzzle game. I've never been familiar with games that scream "PUZZLE", but lots of games have simple challenges and levels where some simple, intuitive problem-solving gets you to win. I decided to do this with Godot, the only game engine I have past experience with. I referred to Brackey's Godot Beginner Tutorial for a refresher on the UI and assets and guidance on a basic 2d platformer set-up.

Next, I already knew I wanted buttons that could open gates, and buttons that would close the gates again, to make you have to find which ones to trust and which to avoid. I quickly got to work making spritesheets of 6 different coloured variants of a simple button animation.

I knew from Brackey's how to set up animations for my gates and my buttons, and how to set up a var _on_body_entered line. But I wasn't familiar with signaling, which I needed for my gates to react to the buttons being pressed, so I went through some tutorials. This Godot signals tutorial sincerely helped me to understand how to use signals between my scenes better, but it was 5 years old, so the lines no longer worked on Godot. I then referenced this Godot 3D Trap Trigger System video from 1 year ago to see how they referenced things on their scene. I realized @onready 's would be very important. But I still got errors.

The videos I was copying weren't working, so I had to solve the errors as they came (when one problem was "solved", a new error would pop up haha) for a while until I got to the final error that wouldn't leave me alone. This Godot forum was a godsend for me.


Finally, I had no more errors, and I could testplay my game again. The signals were working just how I wanted them to, and I was so relieved. I repeated the lines and signals for the rest of my gates and buttons, and I felt happy to have managed to solve this with just me and google.