I took some time away from this project after Halloween ended to reflect on the process of making this project. During that time, I wanted to keep coming back to the game, something was pulling me to it. I really enjoyed making the art and the design process that went into this game and adding more to it was really speaking to me. 

I've been pursuing smaller projects in order to really learn a lot about the Godot engine and programming problems in general. I believe it will help me gain a better understanding of the tools at my disposal and where my limitations are. 

With this update I applied my knowledge from trial and error, many hours reading the docs and playing with nodes to create a small UI system. Now this isn't any major update, nor is it going to seem particularly exciting to anyone who doesn't play around with Game dev. However, this is a big win for me. 

I learned that I'm capable of understanding Node communication and decoupling strategies in Godot. I was able to apply my understanding of resource usage and how important it is to be able to inherit from base classes. 

I created a base class Sign and a small UI system in the main project  to communicate with one another. I made a script that extends Resource called textItem.gd to hold the text data that I want the sign to display when the player enters it's space via Area2D and it's body entered functionality. This allows the Sign.gd script to take a variable of type resource which I can then create multiple of in order to associate a specific text with the item I want to show it. 

Before this, I had it working with hard coded text and couldn't figure out how to get around instancing another sign but it using the same script as before. This strategy is a very simple solution to decouple some of the scenes to reduce the amount of reliance they have on each other and focus more on modular expansion. 

Additionally, I wanted to add some life to the lighting in the environment. I had been toying with the idea of fire flies or something along those lines. I landed on orbs, to lean into the Halloween theme. I added particles and some random movement within the game scene so when you're running through the maze you have some lighting companions and can watch them weaving through the corn. 

I'm extremely happy with the way it's turned out and I think it's a good jumping off point for a lot of other text display options in future games. I love seeing my progress as I learn and I hope that, even though it's small, you see the difference it makes!