Mob Spawner Archives

Week 8 Game Engine Progress

Leave a Comment / 2D Sprite Art, 2D Terrain Generation, Game Engine, Mob AI, Mob Spawner, Tile Assets / admin / July 21, 2020

Game Engine Work:

Rabbits spawning in from the same point on the map at startup

I spent a lot of my time this week working on cleaning up my code and optimizing some things in the game engine. I also did a little work with my mob / npc classes. Last week I created a class for a mob spawner, so I decided to put it to use this week and added some rabbits to my game. I implemented the class for the rabbits and then I worked out some basic movement for them. I just wanted them to be peaceful mobs that would occasionally move around for now. In the future obviously I want to be able to interact with them.

Later in the week I worked on implementing the A* pathfinding algorithm to use for mob pathfinding in the game. It seems to work well at this point, but I need to do more tests with the collision system. It seemed to bug sometimes if the player collides with a solid tile. Other than that, I spent my other time working on art for the project.

Game Art Work:

This week I created the art for the first mob in the game the Rabbit. Because my player sprite is 32 pixels I decided that I needed to make the rabbit 16 pixels. I found it very hard to create a 16 pixel sprite and get the details in to make it look like a rabbit. I was happy with the way the up and down animations looked but the side to side animations might need some work. Let me know what you think in the comments. I also need to create idle animations for all my characters so when they stop moving, they are not just standing still.

I also started working on some tiles for giving the illusion of height. I modeled the sprites heavily after The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past and I will probably add more details to the sprites later. For now, I just needed sprites so I could work out how to procedurally add them to the world generation without causing a lot of bugs.

Work Planned for the Upcoming Week:

This upcoming week I would like to work on procedurally generating the elevation change tiles into the world. I think it is going to take a lot of work to figure it all out. With a bit of luck, I hope it will be easier than I think. After I figure out terrain height changes, I can work on adding rivers. Then I will need to work out spawning entities like trees through out the world. I will most likely work on some art for new mobs just to break up all the coding this upcoming week. Hopefully after this week the map will start looking more interesting so I can start focusing on gameplay aspects. Until next time.

Week 8 Game Engine Progress Read More »

Week 7 Game Engine Progress

Game Engine Work:

This week I believe that I made great progress on the Game Engine. However, I kind of got sidetracked from what I wanted to work on. I had planned to continue working on the map and producing the tile assets I would need for trees and other obstructions. However, I started working on a projectile system, and then found myself working on a spawner system. Once I started working on the spawner system, I then found myself coding classes for the games mobs. I also created the Animated Sprite Class and modified my player movement to use the animated sprite instead of a bunch of single sprites.

The Projectile System:

Basic Arrow Projectile System. Still needs work.

I started out the week working on a simple projectile system. I tried to simulate a bow firing. It is partially working. I will need to work on rotating the arrow to match the direction it is being fired in. Hopefully that won’t be too hard to do. I also would need to make the bow asset and have animations to match the bow firing.

After I had the basic arrow firing, I made it work with collision detection. From there I thought it would be cool to work on a particle spawner system to spawn particles when objects collide together. I used it on the arrow as a test and it seemed cool. Once I have actual objects it can collide with, I will test it more.

Mob Spawner System:

The video clip shows the mob spawner and the basic movement AI at this point.

Since I had a basic entity spawner for the projectile system, I figured I could use it to spawn mobs as well. After a little bit of tweaking I was able to set a spawner near the player and have mobs appear. Once I had that worked out I then added some basic movement to the mob class. I used the player sprite for the first mob because I did not have any other art to use. Using the player sprites worked great for testing it though.

Work Planned for the Upcoming Week:

This upcoming week I would like to start working on the other interactable objects like the trees and grass. Additionally, I would like to start working on elevation change tiles that I can use to change heights on the map. The changes I made this week to the entity class and the way they render will hopefully help me complete some of this work this week. Hopefully I can get a good chunk of this work done this week and move onto more enemies and some more fun stuff next week. Until next time.