Devlog 3, 7/24
Not much progress was made today - in fact, most of today was spent backpedaling. My eagerness to apply new techniques and search up various new ways to do things in the previous days got me into trouble, namely that I was using a wide variety of code that didn't mesh with each other (and most importantly, the main tutorial I am following). So, I made the difficult decision to go back and simply redo everything according to the main tutorial, which meant re-learning some things to the Godot 4 standard.
Silver linings, I suppose, I learned some better ways to use signals and I think I'm understanding more overall.
Today's Dev Log might be more introspective than other logs will be. Going back and redoing things has left me with more time to think. I still don't believe I'm fully understanding what I'm making here. I'm good at following tutorials and directions, and I do believe I have a decent degree of logical thinking that when certain concepts are explained I go "Aha, now it makes sense!" but the real clincher of "why" still eludes me to some degree. It's probably to be expected, given that I have no real coding background or any form of programming experience, but it is filling me with a disheartening sense that I don't deserve to make a game that I barely understand. I will simply have to put these feelings on the back burner and approach them later.
For now, I will leave this log thinking about a puzzling situation I'm in. The tutorial uses a gun with 3 different position markers, and it cycles randomly through each one to fire one singular laser. A neat effect, but not what I had planned for my game. I wanted to fire a laser from specific position markers at once (and eventually create a power up that allows one to go from 1 position marker to 2, to then 3).
Done in GD Script, the code seems to make sense to me. I'm defining the laser start positions childrens as a variable named laser_markers. A second variable then pokes inside laser markers and picks one randomly. However, I cannot get it to work as I'd like. Trying to manipulate line 26 to include all 3 position markers doesn't work, it only wants one value. I feel like I should be able to declare something in laser_markers[] that would just tell it to fire all 3...
Signing off for the night. May tomorrow bring some new perspectives.