News update #2 - Zoomers, AI, destructibles, rooms, and more...

Apologies for being somewhat late on this. I have been hard at work on a lot of features for Coven in the last few weeks. I have a lot to share, so I will try to be brief.

First of all, I have added a few environmental features. There are now some modular spikes that can be integrated to any room, and have its sprite changed to fit the region (snow region, lava, interior mechanical, etc.) with some simple code. The player can take damage and suffer minor knockback from these...

As you can see, some more room work was done, too. Since I am minimizing the environmental details, like interior and exterior rooms, non-transitional doors, foliage, floor textures, supplemental tiles and more, I will be able to complete rooms much faster for demo purposes. So far, there are three rooms, and there will probably be close to 15 by the time I'm done.

Along with spikes, I added destructible crates...

They serve their purpose simply enough, for now. But let's move on to the main subject of this update. Zoomers!

As you can see, the basic AI is complete. There are still some very minor quirks to work out, like initially pathing into walls when spawning, and some other goofy behavior that I just need to notate somewhere to fix, but they function pretty well for a 1.0 demo version. Their general behavior is to find a random, accessible point on the map, and wander to it. Upon reaching it, or getting bored of trying to, it will stop and choose a new path. If it is attacked, and there is a den for it to run to, it will find the nearest one (to its x and y coordinate, not by checking the shortest route, yet), and retreat to it (as shown above), and burrow in, disappearing.

I am pretty proud to have discovered and implemented the motion planning code. It will help immensely with creating AI in the future.

As far as the rest goes, I am laying down plans for implementing the remaining player upgrades, like the Speed Booster, and the Lightsear shield, both of which were present in early game engines, but implemented poorly. I need to add one or two more enemy types to get decent use out of things like Grapple Beam and Lightsear, but a stationary turret is easy, and I can always copy-paste the Space Pirate code from the old engine as a placeholder.

That's all for now. Next time, I will have some good stuff planned for the update.

Take care!
- Echo