This Metal Heart Still Beats

Help your robotic partner, Ava, complete some basic tasks around the house!

Story

Your robotic partner, Ava, has been removed from Long Term Support (LTS). And because of the company's business practices, is no longer able to perform many basic functions. Luckily you are a highly skilled engineer and are able to change Ava's circuits to help them perform basic tasks. Unfortunately, Ava cannot fully power down without losing their memories, but they can go into a low power mode, where they only update their logic _every ten seconds_. It's up to you to help Ava complete tasks!

Mechanics

The node graph is where you place different nodes that connect to perform certain sequences. Ava will produce different events that the code can react to. Actions are propagated all at once, and then performed in a queue.  

Node Breakdown

* Event nodes trigger when Ava produces a named event. There can be more than one event node for a single event, but execution order may be unpredictable

* Action Nodes (Move, Pause, Interact) will be performed when triggered from the left, and will trigger any connected nodes to the right

* The Notes Node is just there as a bonus in case you want to take notes

You can force the "tick" event with the "Force Tick" button. Otherwise Ava will automatically create the "tick" event every ten seconds. This is there mainly as a frustration prevention measure, because I imagine only having something happen every ten seconds would be incredibly frustrating.

The system is intentionally simple. I wanted to ensure that non-programmers would have an easy time picking it up, and maybe being inspired to take up programming using a visual system like what I made.

Problems / Help

Make sure to read the "log" it will highlight "warnings" in yellow and "errors" in red. These will tell you things like when Ava fails to complete an action, and when an event is "unhandled", which means there is no Event Node that received the event.

Specific Feedback Request

Playing the game you can probably tell that Ava's "circuits" are somewhat similar to Unreal Engine's Blueprints. I made this game intended to be a simple puzzle game, but it really inspired me to try and create an addon for Godot that provides an elegant visual scripting solution. This is especially interesting to me since Godot's Visual Scripting language is being removed in version 4. So if I can make a good one, it would be really useful to the community that uses it.

I plan to spend some time learning Unreal Blueprints (for the first time), so I can get a feel for what the professional solution is. But I would also really appreciate any feedback or recommendations that you could provide! My social circles are 99% other Godot devs, so hopefully I can reach some experienced Unreal devs through this!

Tools Used

* Game Engine: Godot 3.5 Stable

* Art: Aseprite & Krita

* Audio: [Jsfxr](https://sfxr.me/) & LMMS

* Planning: Focalboard (Kanban style), and Obsidian (Notes)

* VCS: GitHub

* CI: GitHub Actions

* Love :two_hearts:

Technical Notes

I used GitHub Actions to do Continuous Integration (CI), so you can play earlier versions of the game from the GitHub repo linked below. The version naming is automatic, so it's not terribly pretty. But there should be timestamps for each release. The latest release is automatically pushed to the ItchIO page, so you can play it in your browser over there.

If you think that I have anything missing feel free to let me know. I'm not sure that I can change much after the jam, but I'll do what I can