Navmesh Procrastination

Yesterday I redid most of Cambria's assets (picture below). I wasn't satisfied with the source photography I had taken and edited for most of the textures so I remade them in pixel art. I also slightly modified the player and medic spritesheets so that their eyes are a bit larger.

Tonight I've been working on health bars for the rovers to further telegraph the damage that the player does to them. Other smaller things I've done since my last post here include: adding knockback to when a rover is hit, making damage from both the player and the rovers a random integer between 10 and 25 rather than a fixed value, and some general game balance.

I've done all this as a means of procrastination. Whenever I have a big complicated feature I need to implement, I tend to add a bunch of other smaller things to the game. This is actually kind of a good thing as I can iron out the little details at times where I otherwise would not have thought to. It's also a bad thing, of course, because it delays progress on a bigger and more important feature. This feature, of course, is navmeshes.

In case you aren't familiar, a navmesh consists of a bunch of invisible nodes for NPC pathfinding. It's how CSGO bots (the non-hacker variety) know where to go in a map. My navmeshes will of course be less complicated since Cambria is 2D instead of 3D and requires fewer complex strategies than CSGO. It will nevertheless be a difficult endeavour. After I make my first navmesh and apply it to the medic NPC, I'll get to work on three other NPCs before Alpha 0.4 is released.



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