Writing and debugging…

As end of “Phase Two” is approaching, I ended up with mostly writing and minor bug fixing to do…

So, that’s what I did today… The main target of my debugging efforts was the teleporter… I haven’t messed with it for ages now, so it had a lot of broken pieces in it…

Now you can only teleport to a place where you have line of sight, and that is part of the navigation mesh (to avoid the player going outside of the boundaries of areas). The only problem I have with this system is that it’s now hard to use the teleporter to get out of crags and ravines; I need to check how serious is this and if I can tweak the line-of-sigh algorithm for this to account for it… Conflicting goals: I don’t want the player to be able to use the teleporter to jump to the last room of a pirate lair, for example, but I want him to be able to use it go get out of tight spots (pun intended)…

To make it more useful for combat situations, if you teleport during combat, the enemies nearby will get “blinded”, to simulate the confusion of the quick player movement. They’ll be like this for 2 seconds, which should be enough for the player to either hide or take advantage…

Now listening to “For Aeons Past” by “Solution .45”

Link of the Day: I’ve linked in the past a Kickstarter for a tool that builds normal maps from different pixel-art images to generate something that can potentially be realtime lit… The only drawback of that solution (specially for someone with my meager talents) is the fact that it required the artist to draw the same frame from different lighting conditions to generate the map… This tool doesn’t provide results as good as Sprite Lamp, but it doesn’t require as much input data as well, which makes it a viable alternative, depending on your art capabilities and pipeline: