7DRL Work Post

2:42am - I'm pretty close to just calling today off and trying more tomorrow. I've been feeling just awful today. Not sick, just overworked. It's really disappointing to hit my limits so soon, but as my friends are wont to remind me, this is why I get paid the disability moneys.

I'm also pretty seriously considering not applying for the work I was thinking about doing after all this was over. I was going to apply for a particular company that can't pay yet, but is doing something I like, in order to get in on the ground floor and make myself indespensible before they get real money. But I just can't see myself in that position anymore. Working every day, or even just every weekday, doesn't seem like something I can do. I could barely handle the days at Walmart when I worked there, and they said I wasn't fast enough for them even then.

I feel like a fool wasting everyone's time trying to get jobs I can't do.

Still, I love making games, and even if I don't think I can go pro, I want to keep doing it as a hobby at least, and I haven't given up on 7DRL yet. Though it'll be more like 4DRL at this rate, between having to restart half way through day 2 and spending almost all of today stressed out in bed.

Now for the next thing I was going to do yesterday, I have a bunch of classes to refactor.

3:21am - Alright I've refactored those classes, made nodes, and connected them, then fixed the bugs. It all works now.

Next I need to set up the Timing system.

4:09am - I have a timing system! And the player moves around and collides with walls! For a bit there I had a true and false mixed up and the player could only walk on walls and collide with ground. Not sure how that got flipped but I flipped it back. XD

Next task is to make something other than the player so I can make sure the timing system works properly.

4:31am - Well the timing system works, but my plan of colorizing the tiles by shifting the colour in engine instead of in the art isn't going to work. I overlooked the fact that the background included on all the tiles is only off black, not actual black, and thus also tinted by any tinting.

I'll just have to deal with it the hard way I suppose. I could either go and use different sprites or seperate the background from the sprites via transparency or something. That's kind of a long term project though, more for the polishing stage than basic development.

My next goal, if I'm going to continue roughly following "How to Write a Roguelike" is to make the actors have stats and the monsters chase the player and try to fight him.

And I just realized that in order for A* pathfinding to work I'm going to need to give it a whole new map based off the mix of the terrain map and the actor_list to figure out where all the walls are, or how the hazards will work if they slow the player or act as unwanted but passable areas...

Geez.

This'll take some time and some thinking to figure out.

5:26am - Good news, everyone! It looks like I can modify the pathfinding algorithm from my Godot Roguelike Toolkit in order to make it work with this current project.

On the other hand, it's five thirty in the morning and I'm sick of programming for now. A little under three hours in. That's not a bad time for a break I suppose.

6:26am - An hour long break, I made good progress in Sparklite. Good game! Similar to what I'm doing, actually. So that's neat.

Now I'm going to take a sleep.

7DRL Work Post

11:35pm - Day 5! It's looking like I won't make it in time, but I haven't given up yet. I might at least get something done by the time limit.

The next thing on the docket is modifying the A* pathfinding system I wrote before to work with this new system.

1:22am - After working on modifying the A* pathfinding system I wrote before, I've discovered that it's incompatable with the way I'm currently implementing maps. It was more of a mess than I realized, also.

I'll look at some alternatives.

1:54am - Things aren't looking great and I'm getting stressed out, so I'm going to play a game to calm down. I hope.

4:10am - I'm back at it and I've been looking at the source for GoRogue to see if I can copy the logic.

One thing that's become clear is that GoRogue has been tuned for performance quite a bit compared to the libraries I've used before. It's a shame I can't use it in my game the way it is.

4:55am - I ended up looking into the AStar classes built in to Godot, figuring they must be more effecient than what I can make in GDScript and it isn't as overwhelming to understand as I remembered. I think I can use it.

5:21am - The more I work on this the more I think I should have made a map class instead of just using a flat array. I keep having to remake the same functions in different classes for dealing with that flat array, and I could've made the whole map a secondary node with subnodes for the tilemaps of terrain and fog of war...

Ahh well it's not so bad, that's almost what I'm doing anyways with my Level class/node.

7:05am - I just tested it an the Godot AStar2D implementation seems to work. Now I just need to test it with a creature.

Oh I just thought of something and quickly tested it, and the way it's set up now it can't determine paths to blocked tiles; ie, the locations of the player and monsters!

I'm not sure how to deal with this one. I'll need to give it some thought.

8:13am - It took some time and trial and error but I've got my GreenEnemy following the player, and even printing to the console that it would attack the player if it could!

I also have discovered a bug, whereby the player goes twice before the monsters go, and it looks like the monster went twice too. I'll need to fix that up next time. For now I'm tired and I want to play a game before bed.