Devlog No.018

This is quite a late devlog, though believe me, I wanted to post this one up hours ago, but I didn't want to give up on finishing fatty ratty and pufferfish.

What actually happened here was one problem and one addition.

With the pufferfish, I had the issue where the wind force (inflation) spell would only target him when I had him set to a creature parent. Of course I programmed it this way specifically so that you wouldn't have it accidentally failing to inflate things like boxes. Anything that you can inflate is technically a creature that you can kill/destroy. (Balloons included)

Now I do have some extra variables set for just this sort of thing, but the problem arose in 'other' things. Example being that the blaster weapon tracks creature parents. In that case, that's something I really couldn't narrow down easily without either creating a blaster filter list or creating another dedicated creature parent for blaster only targets.

Fortunately the actual code I use for targeting inflatable things was pretty easy to modify. I simply created a new parent for inflatable things that aren't creatures and then added that new parent to the list of inflatable targets. Which will be beneficial in the long run if I want to have things that aren't enemies that you can inflate. (I do want that)

So that was solved.

The next thing that kept me working was just the raw programming on fatty ratty himself. At first I planned on having him just run away from the player until he was inevitably killed or fell off a cliff, but that felt too cheap of an idea and I don't want to make it so you're punished for my own bad AI when they fall of a cliff. That would be the wrong type of annoying.

With a friend's suggestion, I actually went ahead and created a whole animation of him pulling out a 'hole' ala old cartoons which he slaps on the ground and then jumps into.

Which is what caused me to take a LOT of extra time programming him. Putting it all into sequence so it looked right and some of the things that hung me up was my own overlooking. Especially having him 'jump' up into a spot away from the player. It was a situation where I kept looking over the code and the actual solution was just a simple change from max to min basically.

I should also note that he does not really have dynamic hiding after her steals your stuff. I did not want it like the archers because I didn't want him to accidentally jump some place out of reach. Instead, I have to manually set the place he'll run off to in before trying to escape.

Which I think is the better option in this case since it lets me put his destination far away if I want the player to run a long distance instead of just jumping up after him as you will see in the little video I put up of him. As with everything I do, he requires more testing. I'll also be adding him into the forest area as I had always intended him to show up there first.

I will also likely add more difficult versions of him down the line too of course.

I'm also going to upload a close up animation I made of him during the animation process before I separated the parts into sprites to be programmed in.


Another nice thing I went ahead and programmed in was 'flying loot' as you can see in the video. I think at some point I will likely go back and redo treasure chests/crates so that they 'burst' with loot when you destroy them. The exception being floating crates in certain areas which are specifically made to float so you can actually get the loot.

I'm also in a bit of a pinch to make the NPC of the month, though I will be working on her immediately over the next few days to get her ready to go. I already have an idea for what she'll look like and as I said, I will likely do a fairly straightforward BE animation for her.


Only other thing to really discuss now is just that I'm doing fairly well and the comms have help keep me afloat as I said before. I'm hoping that the next couple weeks I can go ahead and create the filimuri enemy types. (And their booba inflation)