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Nearing the end of player movement development.

I'm getting nearer to finishing the current part of development, handling player movement during the movement phase.

There's still a few parts that I'll have to come back to later, but for now the player's characters move as they should. They don't walk through walls, they don't fall in to pits or walk on water.


Here you can see a small party of adventurers.
Left clicking on an empty tile of the map will send the selected Character there if the path is valid. Left clicking on another Character will select that Character.

If the distance exceeds your normal movement range your character will run, if it exceeds it by double the amount you won't be given the option of moving there.

Improvements are needed, such as showing which character is selected. Being able to select characters by portrait if they are not on the screen (or using the in-game map).


For the next part of development I'm going to be saving a dungeon to disk and working from that dungeon each time. That will make it easier to track changes, compare results and continue the development arc.

I've planned carefully so that any one part of development can be carried out in any order without causing too much disruption, though the natural next step will be player and monster stats.

Once I have the ability to give stats to entities I'll be able to set them up with basic equipment for combat development. Monsters use most of the same code for movement as the players so it won't take much to set them up for movement, however I will have to give them a basic AI.

Here are some of the planned stages of development:
  • Basic player character and monster stats
  • Hand to hand combat Combat (+ Monster AI for that)
  • Ranged combat (+ Monster AI for that)
  • Magic (+ Monster AI for that)
  • Monster spawning
  • Player skills and development, leveling
  • In game UI (It's going to be quite minimal anyway, you'll get a lot of feedback from animations and player/monster behavior)
  • Inventory management and item usage (+ Monster AI for that)
  • Doors and keys
  • Map visibility
  • Traps
  • Secrets
  • Puzzles
  • Menu screens (and some graphics for them, probably some high poly versions of in game equipment laid out in still life)

Sigh, lots to do, but at least I've done a lot already. Most of those stages will be able to use some of the existing code so it's going to go a lot faster once I get going.

Before I go any further though I'm going to have to do some tests regarding the graphics for the game. There might be some big visual changes soon, but they're unlikely to affect the game play.
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