4.x

Pet Following

Problem

You need to have a game entity such as a pet or minion, follow a character.

Solution

We start by adding a Marker2D to the character. This will represent the place where the pet wants to “hang out” near the character.

alt alt

In this example, we’ve made it a child of the Sprite2D, because the character’s code uses $Sprite2D.scale.x = -1 to flip the horizontal direction when the character moves left. Since the marker is a child of the sprite, it will flip too.

Pet script

Here’s the script for the pet.

extends CharacterBody2D

@export var parent : CharacterBody2D

var speed = 25

@onready var follow_point = parent.get_node("Sprite2D/FollowPoint")

The parent variable holds a reference to the character the pet should follow. We then get the FollowPoint node from that so we can get its position in _physics_process():

func _physics_process(delta):
    var target = follow_point.global_position
    velocity = Vector2.ZERO
    if position.distance_to(target) > 5:
        velocity = position.direction_to(target) * speed

    if velocity.x != 0:
        $Sprite2D.scale.x = sign(velocity.x)

    if velocity.length() > 0:
        $AnimationPlayer.play("run")
    else:
        $AnimationPlayer.play("idle")

    move_and_slide()

If it’s close to the target point, we stop the pet’s movement.

Depending on your world, you may find the pet gets stuck on obstacles. For more robust following, you can use navigation. See TileMap Navigation for an example.

Download This Project

Download the project’s example code here: https://github.com/godotrecipes/ai_behavior_demos