EPTPart One - It begins
Part Two - Technical Foundation
Part Three - Game Design
Part Four - Input and Physics
Part Five - More Physics Things
Part Six - Even More Physics
Part Seven - User Interface
Part Eight - UI and the Editor
Part Nine - Editor Progress
Part Ten - Progress, and videos
Part Eleven - Fixing the Physics
Part Twelve - Unproductive
Part Two - Technical Foundation
Part Three - Game Design
Part Four - Input and Physics
Part Five - More Physics Things
Part Six - Even More Physics
Part Seven - User Interface
Part Eight - UI and the Editor
Part Nine - Editor Progress
Part Ten - Progress, and videos
Part Eleven - Fixing the Physics
Part Twelve - Unproductive
This Week
Hello again TeamLiquid! Welcome back to my blog about the development of The Adventures of Sam the Pirate, the 2D platformer I'm creating as the final game project for my Bachelor of Software Engineering degree. Last week I talked about creating the context menu, this week I'll be talking about further work on that, and the work I've done on the editor. Saw a few pencil sketches of character concept art from an artist earlier in the week as well, and I liked what he'd done, so with any luck I will have some character art to show off relatively soonish.
Editor Progress
Context menus now feature buttons, all added and removed dynamically, rather than having to edit code every time I want to change it. Right now, the only functionality in the menu is buttons, but given that I've only got about 12 weeks left, that's probably how it will stay. I would like to add other elements, like drop down, check boxes, etc, but that'll possibly be something for the future after I graduate.
Each context menu is created from an initialization file, containing information on what buttons are there, all the related art, heights of the buttons, width of the menu etc. The height is automatically worked out based on the combined height of all the buttons. The display order of the buttons is done by the order they are created in, so if I want to change the order they're displayed in, I just change the order of creation. When I create other elements that can be added to a context menu, I'll probably have to change how this is done. I'll likely just add a sorting value or something to each object, so they can be sorted in order from highest to lowest, or vice versa.
The editor can now also remove existing tiles, which was something I probably should have done just after being able to add tiles, but never got around to implementing it. The next step is to be able to alter the players start position in the level, which is currently hard coded. This will be relatively simple, and I might work on it after I finish writing this blog post!
Basic Enemies
Part of my work in the editor this week was being able to place the basic zombie pirate enemy, which I can now do. They get saved out to file with the rest of the levels information, and are being loaded into the game in the correct positions. They don't do anything, and are using the same temporary art as seen in this video, so I don't have any videos or screenshots this week! Maybe next week I'll have a new editor video to show the context menu and placing enemies etc.
The current plan for the basic enemy in game, is for it to just walk back and forth. They'll be checking the next grid square in front of them to see if there's anything there, either by using a ray cast, or directly checking that position, and if there is, they'll turn around and walk the other direction until they hit a wall or ledge. As for killing the player when they are nearby, I've got a couple thoughts on how to detect that.
One option, is for the zombie pirates bounding box to be wider than necessary. Then when the player enters that area, it is shrunk to a smaller size, the zombie pirate start attacking, and then I do collision detection from there. The other option I'm thinking of involves checking in a radius around the enemy for the player, and if found, start attacking. It's the same end result, but the first one seems like it might be slightly more efficient, as it's making use of existing physics code, whereas the second option requires adding extra code to the zombie pirate to scan the area around it.
One other consideration for player/enemy interaction, is what if they're both attacking? Which one takes priority? Enemies will probably always be attacking if the player is in range, so perhaps the player should take priority and kill the zombie pirate. Unless of course, enemies have a delay between attacks, and the player can only kill them during that delay. I think I like the second option better, as it could make killing enemies slightly more about skill. Instead of just mashing the attack button as you run through zombie pirates, you have to time it for the delay between their attacks.
I also need to think about whether or not the zombie pirates should follow the player when they are close, or simply walk their paths and attack when the player is in the way. During our Artificial Intelligence player we wrote the AI for a game, where the AI units could detect the player and chase them until they player went out of range. I think it would be interesting to implement something similar here. Give all enemy units a sight range, and have them chase the player for as long as the player is in sight range. The grid nature of each level means I could use a path finding algorithm such as Djikstras or A* so that they can jump up and down platforms, before finding their way back to their area. It's probably a bit much to implement before I graduate in May, so I'll probably stick to something simple and just have them go back and forth, but I think I'll definitely look into chasing and path finding for enemies in the future.
What's next?
Over the next week I'll be implementing enemy functionality, their movement and interaction with the human player. I also need to look at some of the in game menu stuff, as currently there's no way to get back from the game to the title screen in order to start a new game, which is functionality I'll probably need in order to conduct play testing in a couple of weeks. I'll also be poking my artists to see what they've come up with and hopefully have some new pretty pictures to show.
Keep up to date!
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