Day 10: a Mission 2 on paper and three tries at a drowning

Mission 2 on paper

I pulled out a pen and drew the layout. Vertical pit. A zig-zag of platforms coming down. A three-player-wide gap halfway down to thread between two hazards. Two pendulum platforms swinging over the water at the bottom. A lever in the bottom-right corner. Pull the lever, the flood starts, you race up an escape climb on the right or you drown.

I handed Claude the photo and said: build this alongside the current Mission 2, not on top of it. I want both files in the repo so I can keep iterating without losing what works. One session later there was an M2_Pit.tscn next to M2_Veins.tscn, the lever fired the flood, the water rose. The shape of the room matched the drawing close enough that I could play it.

This is becoming a pattern. I sketch. Claude implements. While Claude implements I sketch the next thing. The version control means nothing in the old file is at risk while the new file exists, so there's no "be careful" tax on the experiment. Two of the day's commits happened while I was on a separate piece of paper.

The water that did not kill

First play of the new pit: I pulled the lever, ran to the climb, and watched the water rise calmly past my feet, past my waist, past my head, while my character stood there breathing.

The reason: in Godot, hazards fire on the instant a body enters the danger zone, not while it sits inside one. The flood was growing the danger zone upward through a body that was already standing still. The player never entered anything. The water just got bigger around him. The fix was to stop asking the physics engine and just compare two numbers each frame: where is the water surface, where is the player. The day's other surprise was the same shape. Dying mid-climb respawned me into already-risen water and looped my death. The reset was the same trick, applied backwards.

End to end

The last commit of the day was four characters long. Mission 1's master switch was still pointing at the archived Mission 2 backdrop. I retargeted it at M2_Pit.tscn and saved. The whole chain is wired again. Prelude into Mission 1 into the new Mission 2 into Mission 3 into Mission 4 into the elevator. You can sit down and play all of it in one go.

Tomorrow is not promised to anyone. The narrator beats for the new Mission 2 are not written. The pendulum platforms swing but they do not really feel like pendulums yet. The water is blue and wavy but it could be more menacing. There's a list. I'll know which one I pick when I sit down.