Zombie flocking AI for a prototype I'm playing with. Amazing how simple rulesets can give such emergent behaviour!

Each zombie has a set of weights between 0-1:

1. walk toward where nearby zombies are walking toward (average)
2. turn left/right based on which area is more open (obstacle avoidance)
3. keep walking in the direction you're walking

I did lots today, but I'm completely exhausted. Too much so to write about it all. So here's a low quality 20 second webm video. There's a lot going on here.

http://gfycat.com/VioletLoneBufflehead

(The running looks weird because of the way the timing is going during capture. It doesn't look quite so flail-y in game.)

tl;dr lots more inventory polish, labels on items you walk over, (stackable) ammo items, money items (fuses!), and melee weapons (knife and lead pipe). Enemies with guns will chase you with their melee weapons.

The original intent was to switch Radpoison's inventory system over to pure text: but text requires less work to describe an item than making a graphic. However, convenience won out: tacking on a few simple tweens on a text label and selection rect proved sufficient. I really love these little bits of polish. The sort of tiny things that nobody notices but adds intangible bits of polish and game feel.

A slowly dawning realization in trying to share the development of my game is as follows: taking in-game screenshots sucks. Especially if you dev on multiple platforms as I do. There aren't really any robust tools that work cross-platform easily. tl;dr I'm working on a screenshot/video capture plugin for Phaser. Though I'm developing it as a super-easy-to-use plugin for Phaser in particular, nothing is inherently coupled to it, so making a general purpose JS lib is very much in the cards. The ideal is a one-button press for screenshots, and and a one-button press for recording HTML5 Canvas/WebGL videos.

And hey, look, video recording into GIFs kinda works even! (Bonus: see how bad I am with the shotgun.)

I also spent some time adding more character to gun recoil. It turns out this is, like most aspects of game feel, a super deep rabbit hole to climb down. Recoil gets added every time you fire a weapon, which decides your accuracy (denoted by the coloured aiming reticule). Recoil cooldown is applied both in a linear quantity and quadratic quantity (per gun). (It turns out purely linear cooldown is boring and feels really crummy.) This lets you make things like the Assault Rifle feel tight and accurate for the first few shots before blowing out in accuracy, and the shotgun unable to maintain a steady flow of salvos if you panic and unload too quickly. And, finally, the handgun, which generally stays pretty stable unless you slam on the semi-auto too fast, and even then it recovers fairly quickly. It's the little things that make the game feel right, and hot damn do I enjoy 'dem details.

Huh, the website seems to have eaten my entry text. Aw well, cliff notes version: super crude inventory system (a la Deus Ex 1 or the more contempory Minecraft) that will likely not survive in this form post-prototype. It doesn't actually DO anything yet, so that'll be coming next, as well as some more scavengeable items to collect and use.

Even though this is just some random point lights strewn about, this already has way more atmosphere than the unlit equivalent. I keep on forgetting how bland a scene looks before lighting, and promptly am blown away by how much slicker it looks with.

(Oh, and this table for light RGB values is a wonderful resource.)

I wrote up this lighting system myself, with the intent of making it into a Phaser plugin for everyone else to benefit from. I'll share when I do that.

We'll see how this whole streak thing goes! I threw this together in a few hours to see how the basic sword fighting pacing works, but I'm happy with it as a start. Still pleeenty more to come.