Game Engine Work:
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.