Guides

Longer how-to notes from building Night Audit in Godot. The blog stays for short posts; this section is the reusable engineering cookbook.

• Godot Basics We Used

  Scene tree, CharacterBody2D, signals, exports, and other project-relevant fundamentals.

• Top-Down Player Movement

  Input.get_vector, move_and_slide, no gravity, facing, and time-scale compensation.

• Interaction System

  Area2D proximity, Press E, highlights, groups, and collision exceptions.

• Dialog System

  Multi-turn conversations, current_line advance, period lookup, typed arrays, and dialog bugs we hit.

• Dialog UI

  PanelContainer anchors, CanvasLayer, portraits, and Control vs Node2D positioning.

• Scene Tree and Node Paths

  $, get_node, @onready, groups, unique names, and null instance errors.

• AnimatedSprite2D and Sprite Animation

  SpriteFrames, idle/walk, directional anims, flip_h, import filter, scale.

• NPC Architecture

  One guest scene, GuestData, stations, stands, navmesh steering, schedules.

• State Machines

  Enum-based guest states, transitions, dwell timers, dialog pauses.

• Timers and Scheduling

  create_timer dwell, hourly clock, spawn cooldown, time_scale, avoiding await spaghetti.

• Data-Driven Content

  JSON guests, Resources, roster, SpriteFrames paths, tradeoffs for jam size.

• Camera and Room Bounds

  Camera2D on the player, Room areas, smallest-room-wins, limit expansion.

• Navigation and Collision

  Walkable rects, generated walls, NavigationRegion2D bake, agent steering.

• Debugging Godot

  Symptom / cause / fix / lesson for real errors from this project.

• GDScript Notes

  Language quirks we hit coming from C# / Python / Java.

• Patterns Worth Reusing

  Compact jam-ready recipes extracted from Night Audit.

• Mistakes / Gotchas

  Short, searchable list of things that cost us time.