In my head I tend to get ahead of myself and plan out mechanics which are based on mechanics that I haven't even implemented yet. Adding combat to Death's Doorstep is the worst for this. I've been meaning to do it for months, and it's meant to be an integral part of the game, but I've been putting off working on it for too long.

This last month I decided to prioritize adding combat over anything else, so for this devlog I'm going to break down my process. I'm not done the work that I've started on it, but it's moving along smoothly and you can see the progress I've made throughout the month

Once I had all the animations in place I decided to put together a simple enemy for testing purposes. I likely could've saved some time here by creating a faux enemy instead of polishing up a full-fledged enemy. I was in the mood for something new though, so I took the extra time and fleshed it out. I only needed to make a single animation, the jellyfish eyes are a separate sprite that overlay at runtime. This allowed me to give the enemy a little bit of personality while keeping the amount of art assets to a minimum

The next step is honestly the most fulfilling one imo. Actually adding collisions between two objects feels kind of like the light at the end of the tunnel. Even though you're not done yet, you get to start seeing the fruit of your labor. Your game goes from being a few things mashed together, to something actually playable. I still need to add player health and collision damage, but for now I focused on damaging and killing the jellyfish.

Once you have the collisions setup, then you can really start to have fun with the polish. I added jumping on enemies as a way to damage them. I want Death's Doorstep to feel like a DKC/Metroid hybrid, so this helps accomplish that. None of my player animations are complete yet, but they don't need to be in order to get a feel for the combat I want. There's still a lot of tweaking to do, but at least the way I see my game in my head is starting to line up with the way it actually looks IRL

My next step is likely to clean up the player animations. During this process I noticed some changes i want to make to the Mummy's design. I don't plan on remaking him from scratch (I've redesigned my character enough times already), this is more iterating some improvements onto the current design. Once that's done I plan to actually flesh out the attack animations that are currently using placeholders. What I really want to focus on is adding the next gameplay mechanics though. I haven't completely decided which way to head next, maybe a little bit of both? We'll see