Learn You a Game Jam - End of Day 1

I made a lot of progress day 1!  I got the Main Tank, Archers, and Priests up and walking around.  The MT is controlled by the player, using either WASD, Arrows, D-Pad, or Left Stick.  The guildies are smaller and follow a point behind the MT, one for the Archers, one for the Priests.  

I'm using https://zerie.itch.io/tiny-rpg-character-asset-pack for this project, and I LOVE this pack.  I've hooked up the Idle, Walking, Attack, Heal, Damage, and Death animations in a player.  Then I hooked up all the characters to inputs, so they all walked around and used their attack/heal (animations only) together on A Button/Space press. 

Then I braved making them follow the MT. I took a  bit from Kron -  "How To Make Enemy Move Towards Player in Godot 3" YouTube video and updated it for my needs and Godot 4.  I got them to follow the MT directly just fine, but I ran into issues when I tried to get them to follow a Marker that was a child of the MT.  The idea was to have a rally point for the Priests and one for the Archers for them to try to crowd around.  It just kept staying in the same place near the origins.

I needed the global_position of the Marker for the Guildies to follow, a common mistake according to Reddit.   Global Position, I have a feeling this will not be out last encounter friend!  Then I added a flip to the LOCAL...  position of the two markers along with the sprite  Main Tank Sprite h-flip when facing left so they always line up behind the MT.

So, I have the basics down for Guildies to follow a point, I need an array of offset vectors for a proper formation and a system for assigning spots  to each character.  They are currently crowding each other  to get to the one spot, but a formation will help prevent that.  I might even turn of their colliders with each other - at least when they are heading for a spot.

Moment of pride:

I like how I normalized my player input so you go slow with the analog stick:

# Normalize to keep speed consistent on diagonal movement.  Allows slow analog movement.
var direction_norm = direction.normalized()
direction.x = min(abs(direction.x), abs(direction_norm.x)) * sign(direction_norm.x)
direction.y = min(abs(direction.y), abs(direction_norm.y)) * sign(direction_norm.y)

I don't know if min/max is better than using a if/conditional, but it feels slicker!  There has got to be a way to make it even more compact, but my attempts only broke it.

Next up, SLIME TIME BABY.  I have the slime animations ready to go, but no code to make it work yet.  Once I get a proper enemy to attack I can work on attacks, projectiles, damage, and healing as well.  Then I want to think about how the structure of the game is going to work.  I'm thinking of sort of a belt scroller like Golden Axe, but with a mass of folks behind you acting on your orders and their own volition.

I want to try to use some of the ideas in The Trick I Used to Make Combat Fun! from Game Endeavor here to make Guildie and Enemy behavior more varied and interesting but still reasonably predictable.