Congrats on the indiegames.com nod. I actually have a draft post about Pioneers ready on my site but was waiting for you to add a build with more features before I hit publish; figured you'd not want too many people playing a demo build with little more than walking around.
I really appreciate it but yeah, I'd rather have a more playable build ready before doing so.
Working towards that
Have you played Seven Cities of Gold? This reminds me of it! If you haven't, please play it, it's great and can be an excellent reference!
Thanks, I haven't played it but by the looks and sounds of it seems really awesome, I should definitely try it out.
Devlog 6So, this hasn't been the most productive week and half of the weekend is spoken for as well ...
(going to a funeral) Still, got some things done.
* Screen resolution change / fullscreen toggle in the options screen
* Map scrolling with the mouse and view following
* Beginnings of an inventory
* Movement costs depending on tile types (read about it below)
* Object sorting was still acting up ... list iterator anomalies.
* Some changes to the pathfinder to keep it from finding a path to an undiscovered tile
* Some music overlapping crap on Mac
* I'm sure there's more because I feel like I've written so much code this week but I can't name any features.
Rest of the time has been spent trying out different ways to indicate to the player how many moves does it take to travel to a tile depending on tiles types and stuff.
First of all I tried allowing to move one step at a time and the accessible tiles were highlighted around the player with the movement cost displayed on them. Since the same system should've applied to ships, I discarded it because it was too slow to move around. Then I tried displaying the active path and movement costs at all times, but that didn't feel right because you only discovered that jumping over a river costs 2 points after you started moving. Not cool. For the last and current method I implemented it so, that the path and costs are shown when you hold down the left mouse button. Realease, the indicators disappear and it moves there. I like it.
The last thing that needs sorting out is if and how you should be able to move trough forests. If I discarded forests as blocking areas, the pathfinder would have very little to do and would basically draw a straight line between points, it would only use up more movement points. I feel that should not be the default case. Here are my options:
- Disallow movement trough forests unless you've "forged a path" (basically cutting the trees and lowering the movement cost to 1).
- Let the pathfinder decide if going trough the trees would use less movement points than going around them and return the appropriate path. If the player
clicks on a forest, it goes there no matter what.
Here's how the path indication looks like:
Oh, and 180 downloads for the tech-demo. Crazy people downloading a thing that does nothing. Crazy