As a first whack at the combat pathfinding heuristics, I built a heuristic function that assigns a cost of Distance for an open tile, Distance-1 for a resource node, Distance+10 for a tile with a different-faction destructible, and Distance+20 for a tile with a same-faction destructible. And it wor…

Now that I've started fleshing out the combat AI in earnest, things are starting to get a little bit trickier. AI is one of those fields that is pretty nebulous and highly domain specific. One of the tricky parts of what I'm facing now is pathfinding.

Pathfinding is superficially easy. It is not dif…

Goblinson Crusoe now has the ability to use wood planks to construct a wooden barricade. Wooden barricades have 1000 life, and are extremely resistant to all forms of damage except Siege and Fire (against which they have a -100 vulnerability). With this ability, he can now fort up and hunker down.

I…

Implemented the first (test) summonable: a siege weapon called a Tiny Bombard, which is a bombard cannon. It copies stats right now from other mobs (easy enough to change) but ultimately, siege machinery will be used to deal Siege-type damage against structures. Siege damage will typically be fairl…

Aggro!



I've decided that I need to implement an aggro system. The turn-based scheduler works by giving each unit in turn a chance to move, and the camera follows the active unit, zooming around the map. While other units are moving, the player is idle. This means that if the map is heavily populated…

Did a quick and dirty resource inventory listing widget:



Also added a health readout to the character panel. I'm getting near to the end of my list of "mandatory" UI widgets to implement, before I settle back into the gameplay. These are things I kind of needed. The forms you see here will probably …

The last couple of days I took a brief hiatus from coding. Spent the time doing a new re-topo of the GC model, and building a new IK-enabled rig to do animation more easily. Visibly, he doesn't look much different, but gone are some of the weird deformations when he animates, and gone as well is th…

Had to break down and add some sparklies to loot chests. I was losing them in the darkness, and without a mini-map system in yet (that reminds me; TODO: Add minimap) it's easy to forget a loot chest or two. The sparklies don't cast light, they just use additive blue particles to mark a location in …

Today was sort of a goofing-off kind of day:



This early in the game, it's tempting to start coding up a whole bunch of skills and crafting recipes, but it's sort of a mistake. This phase is what they call building a vertical slice: a small gameplay "area" where you can test out everything the game h…

So, I went ahead and refactored the spellbooks and containers/workbenches UI. I initially had made it possible to have more than one workbench open, but I kind of just don't see the point. The containers as they were weren't very useful, without descriptions, so I modified the player UI so that onl…