Posted September 18, 2020 by IvyppJK
Hello everyone, welcome to my third devlog about the building process of Blue In Town. In the second devblog, I sketchily talked about how I improved Blue's non-pathfinding movement by using the A-star algorithm, some new features that I added to the game, and what I intended to do to help my Blue move around more effectively. In this post, I will update the results from stated solutions for Blue's movement in the previous, summarise the initial implementation on Alice's cooking process, and introduce some new interactions with customers in the game.
(GIF Maker did not allow me to create a longer-than-fifteen-second gif T^T)
Last week, besides improving Blue's movement, I added a C# script to give Alice a moving ability. Since after trying to test the convenience of using all three mouse buttons in the game, I agree with my classmate's feedback that the controls sometimes confuse players. Therefore, I decided to modify it a bit. Instead of using the right mouse button to direct Alice, players will use A, W, S, D keycodes to make her walk around the kitchen. Most importantly, this way helps to take full advantage of the keyboard as players can conveniently press 'R' to open the Recipes and 'C' to cook (I forgot to mention these things in the last devlog).
To collect some comments on the new version of Blue In Town, I should upload it on itch.io before this Thursday. Unfortunately, due to my crazy laptop, I got some problems while exporting the game from Unity. Hence, I could not post it on time for other players to test and could not receive any feedback on it as well. I will try to upload the game on Thursday next week and have my classmates given comments on the new stuff described above.
(Could not make a gif longer than 15 seconds again =(( But you could see Alice continued cooking even the first dish was completed already while there were just three items in her inventory.)
At the moment, I have not got any specific idea for improving this drawback. Any solution to solve it will be updated in the next devlog.
Back to the pathfinding ability after implementing the A-start algorithm, my Blue now can intelligently avoid all obstacles in the game scene and then smoothly reach the target. However, I am still looking for a method to optimize her movement so that she will be able to get rid of all ugly and unnecessary zigzag turns.