I've been thinking about ways to use the crawlers that I wrote last week. Some ideas that I had were maze generation (it is out because the mazes are actually pretty lame), tile texturing (the tiles have to be really large for it to make sense), and random entity movement (not sure why this would ever be useful). Then I noticed that all of the negative space paths always touch the outside border, so if I spawned crawlers on the corners of the space I could fill in the pattern every time. So then I decided to try them with scene transitions and I really like the look. It would only work in games with a certain style and the speeds need to be adjusted because the transitions are too long now, but I'm happy with it.
I made some changes to my crawlers. They still follow the same 6 rules as before, but I changed it so now turning and backtracking along a path no longer take up the crawlers "step", so now they all find alternate paths much faster. This was a design choice the first time, but I like it more now.
I also got rid of the hard coded step distance, so now crawlers can move any number of spaces in a step instead of just 2. I used 2 so the paths are spaced apart, but there is no reason they have to be. So now I could do a very inefficient flood fill with crawlers.
Crawlers can now change the color of the trails they leave behind.
The mouse can now spawn crawlers too. Which lets you do cool stuff.
You can play with Crawlers yourself here.
I made some changes to my crawlers. They still follow the same 6 rules as before, but I changed it so now turning and backtracking along a path no longer take up the crawlers "step", so now they all find alternate paths much faster. This was a design choice the first time, but I like it more now.
I also got rid of the hard coded step distance, so now crawlers can move any number of spaces in a step instead of just 2. I used 2 so the paths are spaced apart, but there is no reason they have to be. So now I could do a very inefficient flood fill with crawlers.
Crawlers can now change the color of the trails they leave behind.
The mouse can now spawn crawlers too. Which lets you do cool stuff.
You can play with Crawlers yourself here.
