Jay Ingle - lead developer, designer, and artist:
Last week I talked about creating a Door that will open if the player has collected the appropriate keys. We have the Door object, and also the Key Altars, which activate themselves, and display their key, if it has been collected. If the Door then acknowledges that all Key Altars have been activated, the Door opens.
When I try to think about how I would have handled coding this situation in the past, it hurts my head to even work through it. Thankfully, I have improved a little.
Initial setup needed: Add Door to a scene. Add all Key Altars into a parent node, and set that parent node as the Key Altar Container in the Door's corresponding exported property. Also set which key each key altar needs, in their properties.
No further setup needed. Can setup be simplified even further? Maybe a tiny bit. But I definitely need to set which key corresponds to which altar. And I feel that dragging the Key Altar Container node into the exported property on the Door isn't too much trouble.
At run time, each Key Altar checks the player's current inventory, looking for its match. If it does, it shows the key, and sets Activated to True.
The Door then uses the Key Altar Container to set up an array which contains all of its children nodes, then checks each one to find out if Activated is True. If all Activated in the array are True, the door opens!
I don't feel that this code is perfect. I don't feel like it is the BEST way to approach the situation. But I am happy with it. Feels like I am using the tools available in a decent manner. Feels like progress.
My apologies if some of this language was too Godot-specific for the casually interested observer!