074 - Pathfinding Improvements

July 05, 2020

At the end of 072 I started a new habit where I deploy at least one player facing thing to the game every day, even if it's a small tweak.

Needing to release something for the game everyday is flexing my iteration muscles and helping me to better prioritize working things that are player facing instead of biasing towards working on tooling.

I plan to continue with this habit for the foreseeble future.

One area of improvement is finding the right size for my daily deployment tasks. There have been days where I took on too much and it left me with almost no energy to make progress on larger gameplay features.

Practice will make perfect.

Pathfinding Improvements

Pathfinding around four blocked off tile sides.

Previously the pathfinding in Akigi only had a notion of an entire tile being accessible, or an entire tile being blocked.

This meant that you could not put a wall in between two tiles that still permitted you to stand on both of these tiles. You would have to make one of those tiles unreachable.

This week I changed how tile permissions are handled to be much more flexible.

The pathfinder now checks for the movement permissions of the borders between tiles. If that border is blocked, it does not explore the other tile as a potential next tile.

I'm using bitflags to encode information about tiles into boolean flags compactly.

Writing Struggles

I'm not doing a good job of dedicating time to writing game dialogue.

Fortunately, at this point I know how to solve problems like this.

Commit to doing it every day for at least two minutes per day until the activation energy required to start gets close enough to zero that it is no longer a task that I avoid.

After going through this with art, it should be easier this time around with writing.

I'm not going to commit to this just yet as I am still adjusting to my new daily deployments habit. But writing will be next on the list of daily habits to build.

Tutor of Science Quest

There are still a few hours of writing that I need to do for this. I'm going to get this done this week.

Game Editor

I've started laying some ground work on a game editor for Akigi.

Game editor It's completely broken, but it will come together.

The first batch of things that I want are object placement, terrain height editing, terrain blendmap painting, and a view to work on dialogue.

Other Notes / Progress

  • Made the game's rendering more flexible. The game can now be configured to render to any number of final render targets. Will be used in the game editor to view the game on multiple device sizes at once.

  • Remade Acacia tree model. I don't like it, so I will eventually try again.

  • I love when a test that I wrote seven months ago fails and I go "Oh! Oops!" Had an old test to make sure that I didn't let the pathfinding go on indefinitely that started failing after I re-wrote parts of the pathfinding.

  • Went through a Substance Painter tutorial and have a much better understanding of how to use the tool than I did a week ago.

Financials

Our financials for June 2020 were:

itemcost / earning
revenue+ $4.99
aws- $189.92
adobe substance- $19.90
GitHub LFS data pack- $5.00
GitHub Pro- $1.33
photoshop- $21.30
CircleCI- $30.00
------
total- $262.46

The CircleCI bill is a one off. I upgraded and then cancelled the same day and moved to self-hosted GitHub actions so that I did not need to download and upload caches during every job.

The Photoshop bill landed twice this month.

Next Week

The most important thing to get done this week is the Tutor of Science quest dialogue so that I can be on my way to finishing the Jaw Jaw Island quests and then moving on to building out a larger world. The main blocker here is that I just have not been sitting down and writing. I've been working on other things.

I also want to make a hefty bit of progress on the game editor. I'd like to be placing objects using the editor within the next two weeks.


Cya next time!

- CFN