AAA combat interactions for your Godot game

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code: https://github.com/Gab-ani/Godot_Universal-Controller-tutorial/tree/episode-4-intermediate-interactions

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• video description

This character can hit, be hit, parry, and riposte. It also has stamina and HP pools and usages for them, and its codebase has zero "signal" keywords.

How to interact

Until now, our controller enjoyed an empty level. But characters must face enemies.

Common way to communicate with other entities often involves signals everywhere or a "game manager." Both are not ideal in this context.

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The root cause of "signal plague" is incomplete understanding of game logic.

• First, a character as a state machine has one entity ruling its reactions: the current state.
  • We don't broadcast; we just call that entity to react.
  • So, no signals are necessary.
• Second, games are discrete; time is measured by physics updates.
  • While multiple transitions per frame might not break the system, a state should execute at least one update cycle between _on_enter and _on_exit.
  • Spamming mid-frame executions is not ideal.
  • Instead, I suggest single-frame management for states, buffering reactions for the next transition logic.

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move gd

When a transition occurs, we ask three questions:

1. does something from the past force us to transition somewhere?
2. If not, does something textual from the present modify our inputs?
3. if nothing above, what vanilla state wants to default to?

So what I did is I renamed all previously overridden check relevances of our states to default life cycle.

Then I modified the state base to have an actually callable check_transition that implements the mentioned steps.

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Deal with parameters

Now, when we learn how to talk with people, our problems have just begun. You'll quickly find that instead of a nice conversation, they're bombarding you with questions about things you didn't know about yourself earlier and didn't even want to. We need to learn how to answer them effectively. These parameters have unique behaviors in every state and often are changed in time. I want to show two methods of conveniently doing it.

method 1

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Method one

simpler, quicker, but less scalable, and works best if your animations have a single window of something.

• Have a default Boolean and value
• then create two parameters for a window that changes it.
• Then your getter for this value just returns the default if the state works outside of said window, and vice versa.

This approach works best if you have very little parameters with simple behaviors, "platformer" is probably what comes to mind.

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