For the firewood conversation, I had one character who speaks a one-off line who wasn't walking into the conversation at the start. It was odd to have the previous speaker say a line, and then sit there wondering what's going on, until finally you see the girl walk into the circle to say her throwaway line. First I thought maybe her behavior tree was getting stuck, so I opened up the behavior tree debugger. I decided since there are many ai's in the scene, to make it a bit easier to open the debugger, by simply clicking on a character, where previously you had to cycle through all of them.

Long story short, it wasn't the behavior tree. For some reason, I had it set so the conversation only tells people who are twice as far as the conversation range to come within range. I think I was going for fuzzier conversation boundaries. Anyway, the girl with the single line was far enough away from the center of the conversation circle to not see her or feel like she is a part of it; but close enough to not get the WALK command. Sigh.

It's minor, but the conversation feels a little bit better now, along with changes I made a few days ago. It's not quite what I want it to be, but it's really close. The characters directions during the conversation is the last real tweak I need to make so it doesn't look janky. Beyond that, I'd like to make them able to have a bit more movement, with characters talking while they walk somewhere - but that's going to take a slightly different approach to the current one.

Added more options to skinning, see: the tigsource devlog for some hopefully interesting info, but if not heres a gif from it:

I'm currently eating cheese.

I am also in the process of adding particles when wall-sliding, but it's currently not cooperating. I think it's being weird because the particles are a child of the player, and as such move in its local space instead of the world space.

Anyway, more progress tomorrow, I hope.

Nico, that was one heck of a sales pitch...

Here we go. I'm learning Luxe. My goal this week is to port Catabalt into Luxe and have it running on HTML5 by the end of the week. Luxe is proving to have a really step learning curve because of the near complete lack of documentation, but its alpha and this is to be expected.

My initial impressions are mixed. I have mixed feelings about initializing objects through typedefs instead of constructors. I can see it being fast and nice, but until you learn all the options that you have it is slow and really easy to mess up. The only place I was able to find what options I could actually use are buried deep in the source code.

I'll admit that I almost gave up on this whole endeavor multiple times today, but I'm pressing on. The real reason that I'm pressing on? So I can use shaders.

Nico, I'm willing to give this a shot because I see where the benefits might be once it is actually ready. I think I'm willing to put time into learning it and maybe even contributing to the project if you can give me some quick, high level overviews about some things. So if you've got time for a couple questions:

1. What is the design goals for scenes and states? I think a state is just a way of organizing code into convenient blocks but it doesn't actually affect what is loaded on the screen. The Scene is essentially a state for graphical elements. Is this correct, or am I way off base?
2. Can you give me a quick overview of how collisions work? I see that I can make a bunch of checks with the functions in luxe.collisions.Collision but I haven't stumbled across how to create them. Do I attach them to a sprite? I'm assuming not in case I want to follow MCV practices. Do you normally tie the shapes to sprites, or move around the sprites to match up with shapes?

I added a flocking algorithm to the mechs for now. I'm hoping it will lead to some interesting movement from squads down the road, once shooting and dodging AI are added as well. I added it to the player too, since I want the mechs in your squad to also swarm around at random while fighting. It hasn't created any weird behavior yet, but I don't think it will be too difficult to fix even if it does.

If anyone has ideas on how to record gifs, or to get haxe to give me a simple web build, I'd be happy to post builds as I go along. But since I haven't figured out how to do any of that yet, here's an application build, if you dare! (also, sorry mac users, linux, mac, and ios builds are disabled since I'm on windows)

Edit: Forgot to mention, left mouse-click to add an enemy, right-click to add the player, arrow keys to move, 1234 for abilities (though only 3 & 4 do anything unless you run in a command prompt), and F1 to activate debug mode.

Although I'm sticking with the premise, I'm starting to rethink gameplay for the readers. It was initially supposed to be 2.5D, but now I'm not so sure... This is the main character, Gnana.