More thoughts on movement

This post will be mainly be about player movement. Currently I have the player move when you press to select the player and drag your finger to where you want him to go. This works fine but it leaves your tacticle options at the mercy automatic pathfinding. To fix this I will add the ability to select,an empty tile next to the player, and draw your parth the  player will follow. The tiles will so show they are selected. so you can see the path. To stop the movement early tap the player to stop or maybe drag another path and clear out the old one. It should be easy to implement  and when I get home after work I will try it.

Movement is in with lots of things to fix

It is not as bad as it sounds. I have the Astar pathfinding working with the character and a flag goes off when ever the player walkes over a game object. The idea is every time the game clock fires the enemy will move. The enemies check a random direction to move one square and if that position is a walkable tile then the enemy moves. I need to also check the list of enemies to see they don't walk over themselves or other things that block movement. This is the starting state of an enemy and when they are activated then calculate the astar to the point of interest

I also need to start a thinking about the z sorting of the objects and get rid of some troublesome bugs.
Another video

I speed up the time so you can see them move in the green walkable areas

Food Will Have To Wait

While implementing the movement for the character I needed to decide what to do when the character moves over a tile that is not an enemy. Every game object is drawn above the map and when you walk over it I currently set the uv cordinates to a transparent and it dissappears without having to translate it or destroy it. This is not the best solution, but I design on the fly, and I feel a pool of objects is needed so I can just reuse the objects and save cpu time creating and destroying them on the fly. This will help when I need rectangles for a particle system (you can't have a zombie game without blood splatter) or with dynamically adding game objects to avoid memory leaks.  

Here is a video of the objects being removed and rember this is pre- alpha.

Well I need to go to my day job. One day I hope to make a living from game development 

A thought about movement.

I was thinking about how movement would work in my tile game. As the map is right now it is tile based with a total map size of 100x100 and a visible area, the actual tiles you can see, about 10x13. The game starts with the map entierly black and as you tap the adjacent tiles to the player to reveal the map. Think the gameplay for Dungelot, http://dungelot.com/, on how to reveal the tiles. Revealed tiles have a chance of giving something usefull for gameplay. I am considering two ways to implement the movement/tile reveal mechanic.

First, the payer has 5 reveal points and 5 movements points to use. As you reveal reveal tiles those tiles become available to move to. If the player has no more reveal points they must use their movements up before the reveal points are reset. This design leads to the player turtelling up, revealing all of the map and missing the sense of urgency a survival game should have. The player has the right to do this and it is my job to make if fun for them.

The second way, reveal as many tiles as you want before moving but for every tile removed the chance of an enemy appearing randomly will increase. This way you force the player to keep moving and they can still loot tiles with out moving if they choose. This brings up a point of what besides surviving will push a player to give up their comfortable kill zone on the map. If the walking dead has tought us anything about zombie survival --then the answer to this question is FOOD.

The next post will talk about how Food is being inplmented in the game

Project Z update

I know there are hundred of zombie games out there. Why would I make another one. Well, because I want to. Every article I read about indie game development states I should make a game I want to play. I want to play a rouge like zombie survival base building game with some secret sauce to make it unique. On to the game update.

The timer is in but needs some work with looping.
Selection of game objects is working and I need to process the begin touch and end touch on the map
I had multiple objects working with the astar pathfinding but the second object had it's start position get mixed up with the the last object that called the pathfinding routine. I need to implement a queue so I dont have 2 pathfinding routines running at the same time.

Things related to movement:
     the position of the objects need to be checked before a player or enemy is moved.
     If the player has a ranged weapon and taps on a enemy calculate the line of site.
     If the player is adjacent to a corner wall the damage of a ranged attack will be halved if the wall is
     infront of the player.
General things to think about:
     the interface
     the player inventory
     exploration of the map
     implement the button class
     the role of NPC's
     fire and how it can spread and damage tiles
     same screen multiplayer

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Still no fun yet but...Progress

Thing on the next up list:

The timer is being re-examined to see the proper way of implementing it with the game objects. The game objects have an animation class attached to them and I will also attach the timer class.  After I figure out the callback routines used in the class I am  using.

A gameState for holding various game controlling variables.
    currTile to tell what tile to animate/show selection
    prevTiles to tell the last selected tile to stop from playing the list of UV cordinates and go to the
    initFrame.
    gameState playing, menu, paused, map, gameOver, splashScreen.
 
The game timer will fire every 1 second but it is a variable and can be changed
     the enemy timer will fire every 5 seconds to start
     this will decrease with the noise level
     the enemy can move or attack but not both
     the hero's energy variable will add to the enemy timer
     the hero's will move every second as a baseline

Need to implement the "Secret Game Play" map and inventoty stuff.

The a-star and los fire needs to be reimplemented

First I need to get the checkNeighborTile working when it finds something in the grid[][] map

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Bug fixing and cleanup

I took a week off from programming, it is a part time hobby of mine, and now I am ready to attack the next set of issues. One bug that killed 5 hours of productivity is finally dead. I use counters to add rectangles to my map mesh. So, 1-100 are the tiles of the map and counter 1000 on up was for the items and player and enemies. I found out the hard way there can be no gaps in the numbering of rectangles being added to the mesh. If you have a break in the numbering then the rectangle shows up and is textures with the whole image map. As soon as the numbering was sequential without gaps...poof texturing worked.

The next issue is the tileType id from Tiled map editor needs to be hard coded so the map draws the correct objects.

Thing I finished:
Game Timer is in with start and stop events on and individual
animate objects with their own framerate
map scrolling in the x direction now works correctly tile updates