I skipped the last couple of days because I kept getting stuck on things and didn't have much progress to show. Also, I spent most of yesterday playing Middle Earth: Shadow of War since I only got halfway in last time I played and wanted to try out the new update they released. Anyways, I've finally got some success to show off!
I ultimately decided to hold on fixing the sprite. I might go back to it later or ultimately end up using a generic rotating top-down sprite with animated legs. Before I wasted too much time on that I decided I need to work on the game's foundations and just put in a simple square to represent the player. I spent most of yesterday fiddling with godot's animation player and playing with particle settings. I hope to add some more juice to it before completion, but this is a solid foundation
Next I cut up my tilesheet for the background art, built a little testing arena so that I could make sure the hitboxes were working and tried to implement knockback. I'd like to give a shoutout to TaciturnGamer from the discord channel who spent a couple hours of his time helping me troubleshoot this, I don't know if I could have figured it out without him. The knockback gave me a ton of trouble. My main issue was that I was having trouble getting the player's position so I could use it to knock the enemy away. I found a method in a tutorial but for some reason I just couldn't get it to work, and then when I finally did get a response...well this was the result
No matter what direction I hit it from the enemy drifted to the lower right corner. Taciturn and I eventually figured out that the problem was that I wasn't retrieving the players position for the knockback, but the global (0, 0) coordinate. He gave me the idea to pass the player's global position along with the damage information, which worked perfectly. This is the end result
Tomorrow I figure out how to lock the player's movement and rotation when casting water whip and add dodging with the associated i-frames