Good morning! Since I started this devlog, I’ve been working a lot on the game. Well, first of all, I'd like to mention a bug that was driving me nuts for the whole week. There was something wrong with my A* implementation which was making actors see some spots that were unreachable as reachable, such as:
That was happening because I removed a key part of that code while trying to optimize it, which was:
That happened because, when a path is not found, the algorithm returns a path with 0 points. When I read that like a week after writing it, I was like: “well, that check’s completely unnecessary”. The problem is that it only became an issue a day or two later, so I had no idea what was causing it, or if it was my A* map implementation that was buggy. From now on I’ll start leaving a lot of comments in my code so I don’t stand in my own way by doing stupid stuff. Also, my new motto:
“Early optimization is the root of all evil.”
I also started working on some console messages since I don’t want to spend time working on GUI. The time one spends doing GUI is absurd, and it usually gets me unmotivated to work on the projects. Reason? Well, it sucks to work on something for a whole day and the result is that there’s more text populating the canvas.
I made a simple movement system which is far from ideal but makes things feel a bit more alive, I don’t feel like spending time working on that kind of stuff now, the core of the game will be a priority (read A.I., stats, equipments and such). The stats were implemented but only Athletics work so far: the higher the athletics, the farther an unit can move; it will also affect how quick an unit’s turn will come and how high they can jump.
That’s what I’ve got so far: units that can move around, passing through units of the same group (just like in games like FFT), and the distance is based on their Athletics stat. I decided to call the ranks as CPU cores (single, dual and quad) and their bodies cases. Seems adequate. So yeah, even not achieving much, I’m glad I spent a lot of time on the game in the past couple of days and I hope to bring some cool updates next saturday!