Video Game Blog
July 26, 2019
Okay. I do believe monster assignment, saving, and loading...is complete!
In the screen shot below, you can see a variety of monster (terrible) graphics projected onto the map. Something new added is the Reset Mobs button. This completely clears the list of monsters. If a User wanted to remove an individual monster, they simply click it.
One thing I don't like about this system, but allowed...is that when the monster's A.I. moves them into a tile occupied by another monster they can stack. I could add a collision test to stop this, but will not be added at this time. Later versions of this project will remove that.
As for now it's something to tolerate.
Oh! The pain an agony of using terrible graphics! It burns my eyes! It burns!!
I went back to review the list of things I was going to work on this month. I just realized I finished everything listed...even the things that I thought I was only going to start working on - with a week left in this month.
I will start working on the "known paths" system.
I'm probably not the first one to think of this idea. All of the books that I've read about game development talking about "Pathing" and some of the most basic ways a monster can make its way around the game map to chase the players.
They usually have this piece on how to assign a search that the mob is assigned to create a map to follow to the players' Avatar. This takes up a lot of processor time. Not acceptable to me...
My idea (original or not), is when assigning data to the maps, to have the User assign paths they want the monsters to "know" about. This simulates real-people knowledge about their "home towns" and how they navigate simply thinking about how they've gotten somewhere before.
In this game, the monsters residing on a map consider it their home turf and should know how to get around the most efficiently. Why not just make a series of trails that they can access like a memory?
