Enemy mechs now shoot at and follow the player when close enough. Still working on level-gen stuff. Tired now. going to bed.

Worked on a few more improvements with parenting stuff together instead of moving everything down manually.

Also prevented coins from spawning on spike traps.

Rei is a farmer.

Unable to use my home computer today, and missed a streak yesterday, I decided to find something simple to do for a few minutes at work. For dialog, I started with a json format for substituting variables in text. It looked like this before:

[{"random","choices":["Hello.","Why hello there","How do you do?"]},"my name is",{"v":"name"}]

There was a lot of ugly type checking (are we using substitution at all? Then just copy the string. If we are using substitution, we have to check whether each chunk is a string or keyvalue (python dictionary). It works, but it's a little sloppy, and editing this weird format as a writer isn't as freeing as it could be. So during my lunch hour, I converted the above syntax to this:

"{random/Hello./Why hello there/How do you do} my name is {v/name}"

Easier to edit and cleaner to parse. The downside is that it's a little bit more work if I want to support recursion ({if_friend_alive/Here {random/is/are} some more {random/text/words}.) But most of the things I would need recursion for will be better handled elsewhere - in the structure of the conversation system or events choosing the appropriate conversation.

For the most part, I am trying to stick to json only for all of my data formats. Earlier on for instance I converted a custom format for behavior trees into json because I kept adding new syntax and it got too complicated to quickly. But here I think that editing convenience trumps the downsides of having a specialized format. With behavior trees, some of the editing would be made smoother if I had a nice gui for them. But with text... text is just text, and the fastest way to write it is something similar to above. As long as I keep the number of special cases and commands low. Which may or may not happen knowing me.

Phew, I've tried all day to figure out a good UI toying with Fungus features and learning Unity's UI engine on the fly -- haha that was not easy, but I think I'll be able to do what I want to do:

- Having a set of choices available anytime during a sequence

- Expandable menus for choices: choices will be regrouped in several categories à la Bioware's wheel with the options, especially the Investigate one (kindof)

Can't wait to dig further into that!

Lots more progress on Catabalt. The background elements are in place with parallax scrolling. I also adjust the height vertically depending on the player height to give everything a pseudo 3D feel. It doesn't quite look the way I'm envisioning it yet though. I think there is too much vertical movement. The thinking is the higher down you go, the more the city rises above you.

You can also now collide with boxes, which slow you down and make it harder to make the jumps. Most of the graphics from the previous game are in place. I don't like everything, but I think I'll stick with it just because I don't want to remake them for what is essentially an engine test.

All that's left to do is create the main menu and lose screens and I'll be technically done. Oh, and figure out how to get Joomla to let me publish HTML5 correctly. I read up on it briefly and I think there are Javascript settings I need to change.

EDIT- Oh yeah, I made the camera move up and down dynamically to follow the cat through his run. I really like the effect.

Hey there, very first post on streak club!

I've resurected my project from last Ludum Dare, since I really like the ideas we came about.

Today I started reworking our collisions system, which really sucked and was painfully slow.

More about the game in later posts. :)