Mycoflora 0.0.7

Development slowed down for a bit, but it's been picking up again and I'm feeling really excited about where things are going! The main highlights of this update are enemies behaviors and dialogue.

Enemies are a little smarter now. The small mushroom enemies now have pathfinding so they won't get stuck on obstacles, they'll path around trees and just all around be a lot smarter. They also will continue to move to the last place they saw you after you leave their vision radius. Previously, they would just stop moving the moment you're out of range. Finally, they're a little better at actually attacking. They used to only do their lunge attack when you enter their attack range for the first time, but now they'll continue attacking as long as you remain in that range.

I also spent a lot of time reworking the dialogue system. At one point, when I got frustrated with expanding the dialogue system I was trying to create, I discovered that someone already made a really good one as a Godot plugin. It supports branching, the nodes make it really easy to add more dialogue content, and I think it allowed me to add branching dialogues really easily. The main downside is that if I followed through with my system, it would have supported translation and this system does not. As a monolingual solo dev, I won't be adding translations myself, and while it's possible I'll receive volunteer translators, I think the likelihood is low.

With this overhaul of the dialogue system, I was able to add a few examples of the branching dialogue I have in mind. Once you defeat the boss, some of the dialogues with certain NPCs will change.

I think my next goal will be to add an inventory system. Now that we have swords and the artifact dropped by the boss, I need an actual system to keep track of what you've picked up rather than hardcoding everything like I'm doing now. I also want to add more enemies, both in number and variety. Once you unlock magic, there's nothing left to fight, but I also some other enemy types I'm excited to start fiddling with.