The Basics

I know what I want things to be like and move like in my head and to get started on that I need a shark. I could just use a placeholder shark but I think it’d be fun to make one myself & it would definitely help to give a better feel of things.

The Shark

With that thought in mind I looked up a youtube video of Great White sharks & watched closely as they swam by the camera & ended up with this:

This is a slightly more detailed version that’s bigger & isn’t the final sprite by any means, it’s a placeholder that’s more than just a simple shape or something. This took about ~45 minutes to make freehand. Then I spent another ~1hr animating some basic movement. Nothing crazy really, just something to try out in godot to indicate that animations would be working. Getting this right took a bunch of tweaking and I’m still not 100% happy with it but it’s good enough for now.

Huge shoutout to aseprite, the incredible tool I’ll be using for most if not all the art for this game.

Now that I’ve got the shark, time to start making him move! Speaking of him, I think from now on I’ll call him Bruce, after the shark from Finding Nemo. Fish are friends, not food!

Getting Started with Godot

To get started I just rolled with the project setup for a simple 2D game from the godot docs. I continued onto making the player character and instead of the assets they provided I slapped in Bruce.

He was a bit small though so I just scaled up a bit and he fits right in.

That blue box you’re seeing is Bruce’s hitbox, I purposely didn’t cover his dorsal fin for two reasons:

1. Having the hitbox be a square makes it easier to work with, extending it upward would make the box cover the empty space around Bruce which would be unfair to the player. I know I could almost definitely add another hitbox for just the dorsal fin but reason 2 is why I didn’t.
2. I can already see the fin colliding with terrain at inopportune times. I might come back to this later and try to get a perfectly shaped hitbox that can’t collide with terrain but that’s for later.

Movement

I’ve known from the start that I want movement to be controlled by the mouse, as in the shark should swim towards the players cursor. I was also tempted to make the shark always move because sharks always move forward but that’d just get annoying so I went with cursor movement while the player is holding the "W" key. Being a game engine of course there’s some handy built-ins to get that working.

move_and_collide()

Definition from the Godot docs

This method takes one required parameter: a Vector2 indicating the body's relative movement. Typically, this is your velocity vector multiplied by the frame timestep (delta). If the engine detects a collision anywhere along this vector, the body will immediately stop moving. If this happens, the method will return a KinematicCollision2D object.

There’s also move_and_slide() but it seems like move_and_collide() is what’ll work for now. I’ll probably come back to this later and try to get a better understanding of the differences between the two, and figure out if I should be using one over the other or something else entirely.

For now though I played around with move_and_collide() and saw from another video how to make a camera that follows the player. I ended up with this:

Getting the camera to follow was also easier than I thought, you basically slap a Camera2D down, and a RemoteTransform2D node as a child of the player, then have the camera follow the RemoteTransform2D.

There is some weird stuttering happening, and I think this is because sometimes it tries to move to the mouse when it’s already on it, so I had it stop moving when it’s within a certain distance, but then it just stutters from further away. My guess is I’ll need some sort of distance check that then decelerates the the shark as it gets closer to the mouse. I’ll have to look into that later.

You probably also noticed that Bruce isn’t “looking” at where he’s going so that was the next step. At first I was going to use the built-in look_at() and just target the mouse but that resulted in the rotation being very snappy. I then found a great video on having things rotate smoothly towards a target and ended up with this:

It’s still fairly snappy but now I can adjust the speed of the rotation which I will do more of later. But there was one other issue, that being when you move your mouse in a circle, Bruce does some pretty unnatural rotating 😆. So to fix that, I just needed to check where on the screen the mouse is, and flip Bruce accordingly. Wah-lah!

I also whipped up some basic basic tiles just to test out the collision detection and it works great so far:

So far so good! Next time I’ll be working on a basic parallax background & the first eatable fish.