Today was vehicles day! What are city streets without traffic?
I built:
- A basic pedestrian entity, that uses a simple nav-mesh system. I place invisible entities that pedestrians look up to decide where to move to.
- Added multi-part vehicles.
- Intersections, with stop lights and a working “cycle” system.
- A vehicle “consumer” that deletes vehicles nearby who get off track.
My level design collaborator filled in the remaining holes in the generator block types for roads.
I spent a lot of the day on a mistake – I thought I wanted vehicles to spawn in continuously from “deadends” in the road network. There was a certain logic to this. It turned out to be both tricky to implement (the multi-tile vehicles are finicky) and when I got it working, the streets were just flooded with traffic. Plus it made me realize that the actual network itself needed to be coherent; there could be no loops. All traffic needed to move from a source to a sink reliably.
Over dinner, I was bemoaning my poor planning to my son and as always rubber-ducking my problem made me realize my error. What if I simply … baked the vehicles into the road tiles themselves. It’s not quite as systematic. But turned out to be a lot easier and a lot more reliable.
So I exited the day with roughly what I was aiming for. A working vehicle system that the player can interact with dynamically.
Next Up
The days go fast! My high level modules left are:
- Enemies + “death”
- Player movement tuning (and add energy system)
- Player abilities
- Objectives + success
- Multiple levels
- UI polish (minimap?)
- Tutorialization??
More of those than I have days left. But I think many of these will be less than a day to do. Tomorrow is probably Enemies and “death.”