Wow. Over a year since our last update and 2 since we've done any significant work on Corvian Curse. It took me a while to get back into a good groove after I started working again. Personal projects were just hard to find the time for, but for the last few months I've found a second wind and we've all been really going hard again. Well, we're finally ready to release our next update, and it's a...

Even as far back as the precursor to Corvian Curse, BitChunky, it was clear I'd need a state machine for handling state transitions for the player and enemies. Having all of your logic dumped into `_physics_process`, even with functions to help with organization, quickly turns to spaghetti. I've seen a few patterns for doing state machines with Godot but they're often component based or spread...

In the game I'm working on, Corvian Curse, death is not uncommon. Sometimes a lot can be happening and your run is suddenly over. If you weren't paying attention you might have missed what killed you. Without knowing why your run ended it can feel unfair and you lose an opportunity to learn from your death. Because of this we wanted to give the players a replay of the moments leading up to the...

_If you just want to jump to the new system feel free to skip to the design_ My game Corvian Curse started as a quick jam game where I just wanted to test procedural level generation for a 2D platformer, in a similar vein to Spelunky. Once I had the level gen dialed in I set out to make a simple character controller and the obvious choice in Godot was to use a CharacterBody2D. Eventually I wanted...

Recently at `$job` I spent a Hackweek making Rust ready for production deployments. Part of that was figuring out what builds were going to look like. One of the really nice things about developing Rust code is the included package manager, `cargo`, and all of the crates available at crates.io. One especially nice feature of crates.io, compared to other package repositories I have experience...

At the end of our last lesson we'd learned a bit about how to modify pixel shaders based on color information and coordinate information. We went through some really cool effects but some of them weren't especially efficient considering all of the conditional statements that it would go through for every pixel every frame. The primary focus of this part of the series is going to be passing in...

When left off we had just implemented our grayscale shader. Just as a reminder, since we'll be building on this function, this is what the PixelShaderFunction looked like. ```csharp float4 PixelShaderFunction(float2 coords: TEXCOORD0) : COLOR0 { float4 color = tex2D(s0, coords); color.gb = r; return color; } ``` I want to take a minute and talk about the type and how we access that...

In this post I plan to show you how to setup the most simple of pixel shaders using HLSL with XNA 4.0. In addition to the code here you can find some full examples on BitBucket. Feel free to fork and push back more examples. For a quick view on the shaders i'll be implementing you can take a look at:   If you're still interested, lets start with the most basic shader possible. Start a new...