Pickledtezcat Game Devblog

BGMC16 Recently I took part in (and won) the 16th Blender game making challenge. This is a week long game jam for the blender game engine. It's always a good time to make quick prototype games and see what an idea might look like if it was brought to completion. For the contest I made a super bomberman style game, but with some roguelike elements. You can play it at GameJolt . Spotted! You can see right away the level generation, made using a BSP tree algorithm. There's also grid based movement, and permanent death (you only get one life).   The AI was super simple to set up, and the whole game was so easy to program compared to a more "simulation" type RPG. The theme of the competition was stealth, so in the game you should try to get past guards who have a limited field of vision, and an limited attention span. This makes stealth as a game plan a real possibility. They will follow you if they see you, but if they lose you they go back to patrolli...

I've already gained some speed improvements from how I'm handling dynamic blocking objects, but I wanted to revisit some of my older code and see if I could clean it up a bit. One of the things I was doing before to make faster calculations was to strip the A star graph down to a bounding box around the start and end + a small border. Actually this turned out to be slowing the code down once I reorganized things. The only time this would speed things up is if the map were really huge, the start and end locations were really far apart and every room on the map was open... So this got dropped for now. I was doing some esoteric things with getting the nearest node in the graph for a start and end point, which was almost taking longer than the A star search (on short routes)! So that got cleaned up. The route smoothing pass cleans that up anyway. Here's the end results for comparison: Almost a 50% reduction in some cases. It may not seem important but once there are ...

I've been working on a number of side projects recently, so no actual work on Treasures of the Deep Dwellers. However all but one of those side projects have been aimed at testing some ideas with a view to restructuring the project or developing key components which were missing. When I finished working on the most recent version, it felt like I was nearly ready to put out a demo... but after trying it out for a while I wasn't satisfied. Movement calculation was too slow, the characters and AI were too complicated and not well designed. Adding to them was becoming too much of a chore. And there was something wrong with the pathfinding... I took part in a game jam and had the opportunity to work on an FSM ( Finite State Machine ) for character management. The version I designed for the competition was a little limited because I didn't use classes , I had to define all properties for all states at initialization of the game. The result was pretty messy, but it worked m...