3/12/18 Development Update

Hello and welcome back to another development update.

For this week I chose to take a step back from working on the boss mentioned last week and focus on adding a long requested feature, companions. Companions are designed to function similar to the ones in the Secret of Mana series of games. Moving forward players will be able to pick and choose which companion they want accompanying them, each with their own unique skills.

This week I programmed the basic behaviors for the companions including following the player and acquiring and fighting enemies. Doing most of this was pretty easy, however, I noticed that the companion like the enemy AI constantly got stuck on terrain.

So in addition to getting the basic companion AI completed, I also began work on making some more advanced AI pathing algorithms. The way I did this can be sen below, using a derivative of nodal pathfinding, where the AI will go from valid node to valid node until it reaches the destination. The nodal system can be seen below, where the green lines are passable terrain and red impassible.

Writing the algorithm was a pretty fun experience, and more work still needs to be put into it. The plan for it is to not only make the companion AI smarter, but also the enemy AI.

That's it for this week! 

3/5/18 Development Update

Hello and welcome to another development update. The bulk of this week's work has gone into the creation of the boss for the Mier Mines dungeon. I started working on this boss last week, and since then it has gone through a lot of testing and changes, and in truth most of the work went into tweaking the fight so that it feels good and conceptually works with the boss.

So after many iterations I chose to move away from the initial concept of the boss being some sort of slime that takes the player's shape. I chose to move away from this since we already have a slime like enemy with the Slime King. This made me settle on the current iteration of the shade which takes shape based on the player, changing based on the character you choose. As it is now I am happy with most of the mechanics, though I am still tweaking to make the fight feel better conceptually.

Moving forward I'd like to finish and finalize the fight, as well as begin work on the companion system as well as bringing more controller support to the game.