Improving the obstacle course

In this chapter, we return to the Obstacle Course to create more mechanics that will make the project feel more like a real game.

So far, we have covered:

• How to set up collisions.
• How to draw walls to prevent the player from walking off the level.
• How to generate random obstacles using blue noise.
• How to create a push wall trap to slow down the player.
• How to make a countdown intro animation to give the player some time to get ready.
• How to use a timer to code winning and losing conditions.

We’ll use the finished project from the previous series as our starting point. You’ll find a fresh copy to be on the same page in the folder ObstacleCourse_Part2/. That’s the folder in which we will work.

The mechanics we will add in this series

In this series, we will add a couple of new mechanics.

We’ll start with pickups that affect the player in two different ways.

The first one is a ghost effect that makes the player pass through walls and not trigger traps. This effect wears off after a few seconds.

The second pickup is the speed boost. With it, the player’s speed almost doubles. The effect ends when the player collides with an obstacle or goes off-course.

We’ll introduce doors that open when moving over pressure plates. These pressure plates will open their corresponding doors for a limited amount of time.

We’ll extend the intro animation with a panning camera that showcases parts of the obstacle course.

We’ll then refine the game’s look with particle effects.

We’ll refine the visuals and add more mechanics to our existing game. This mirrors real development, where you change, polish, or add functionality to make a game feel better.

We’ll start with the pickups in the next lesson.

Locating the Lesson Files

To get started, open the project “Learn to Code with Godot: Practices” in Godot and, in the FileSystem dock, expand the ObstacleCourse_Part2 directory, and double-click the ObstacleCourse.tscn file. See you in the lesson!