Goals for Week of Nov 24th

Hey all!  I'm going to start posting weekly "here's what I plan to do this week" as a way of organizing my efforts and keeping myself accountable going forward.  At the end of the week I'll do a review post to see what I actually got done :)

Now that I'm wrapping up the "core" refactor which I blogged about a few days ago I'm feeling really good about where the code for the game is at and I'm excited to be able to add more features to the game.  This week's goals entail:

• Adding the "turn order list" UI control back in, showing which units will be acting next in turn order
• Work on pathfinding for the move action.  Right now I'm just doing a blanket "3 squares away" but I want to switch this to be "whatever you can afford to move to", which entails a few things:
  • terrain costs; different types of terrain will require different amounts of AP to move through (i.e. a road tile might be 10 AP whereas a river or mud might be 30)
    • this also implies different types of terrain, which I should represent visually.  Will play with some different textures
  • pathfinding; if we're restricting which tiles you can move to according to how much AP you can afford that means we have to calculate which tiles are in range, which is a bit more complicated than just saying "3 tiles away"
  • showing which path the unit will take, in relation to the pathfinding.  This will likely be more relevant in the future, where walking through a tile might give you a tag (i.e. walking through a mud puddle might make you "dirty")
  • differentiating between tiles you can move to and still have enough AP to perform an action, and ones that will prevent you from performing an action when you move to them.  If you use all your AP to run across the map you'll be too tired to make an attack, but that should be visually obvious when plotting your route (like in other games like XCOM)
  • animating the unit through the path.  Right now the units just tween their way to the new tile on a diagonal and through other units, which doesn't look great

I think that'll take me most of the week to figure out.  If I end up with extra time I might work on designing a specific map or two; I had a good brainstorming session with Gemini about a "plot and parcel" map generation method, but that'll be a ways off before I get to that.  I'd rather make a solid river map we can test with, and also work on being able to load that from config.

Have a good week everyone!