Upcoming: AI

For my next (trick) article, I'll be writing about my approach to game AI, how I define AI, and what makes AI different from "behavior". Stay tuned!

Photographilia

To settle any potential picturelust, I’ve uploaded these three pictures for your enjoyment:

OOOOH, shiny! I’m guessing this is the Mineral Deposit.

Frickin’ glowing mushrooms, mannnnn!

Spoiler: The mushrooms restore your MP, so in this stage you’ll get wreak havoc with your Magic. Plotline justification not included!

Awww, how cute!

Spoiler: He’ll kill you.

Let's finish this!

Hey everyone! My school year has just finished and I am now officially in my last year of high school. My personal agenda aside, this summer my goal is going to be to finish up Pocket. I have so many cool features planned, and I plan on working quite hard getting them all in over the summer. I'll have plenty of time, after all!

Among the features planned:
• a clever skeleton
• an overprotective arachnid
• a vein to strike riches
• summoning the power of a bartender

Circle Pads and Peep Shows

No blog is complete without a proper dosage of “porn”, so first I’ll give you a little peep show on what’s up at the moment:

Oh snap! So what can we dissect from this… Hmmm… There’s a little circle thing on the bottom left instead of the minimap, there are strange boxes with doors which have enemies crowded around them…. And the stage is purple with gold bits strewn about.

I’m not sure where this is, but it’s pretty obvious what that circle pad is for, right? Duh…

Touch screen controls have arrived!

And with that there is the option to replace the minimap with the circlepad. While many touch screen devices with flash embedded probably have a keyboard, we obviously don’t want to leave the others out. So in the options menu(by the way, I added an options menu) you can now toggle on/off the circlepad as well as change it’s size. It’s important that you can change it’s size to accommodate different screen sizes and player preferences. My circlepad also supports easing—The farther the player presses to the outer ring the faster the player will go. There is error with a direct implementation of that idea, though. The player would have to consistently float their finger around that outer ring to sustain maximum walking speed. Ouch much? Therefore I implemented it so that you only have to be 50% towards the outer ring for max speed… Much better! It’s the little things.

I’m adding more things for you to fight in the Cave

And I’ll just leave it at that—letting your imagination take you the rest of the way. One hint for you, though: Gauntlet.

Top-Down Attacking

Time for a technical post!

So today I was working on an AI of a smarter variety for Pocket, and rather than flinging itself at the player or shooting them, it instead attacks them with a sword. This is a different “hit box” entirely, which extends from their normal “hit box”. The enemy closes on the player and hits them. But since my game has entities facing left/right/up/down, I faced a problem. Check out my diagram here to see the problem and how I tackled it. I hope it helps!