Sabbatical Log: November 30th

This blog series is running about a week behind my actual work, giving me time to clean things up.  The date the actual work was done is in the title, horizontal lines indicate when I stopped writing and started coding.

It’s my last official day of sabbatical! I’m still planning to do a retrospective post, and have the weekend to maybe do some extra-sabbatical work.

But today, I’m hoping to finish up the sword knight.

I’ve got some smarter state management on the knight, it will no longer wander too far away from its origin, and have made the sword sharp. Now, when it’s in motion, it will “do damage” to anything it comes into contact with that can receive damage.

Right now bushes are the only things take take damage, so the knight is limited to cutting them. This is, again, emergent behavior – neither the knight’s code nor the bush’s code knows about the other and the collision system is completely ignorant of damage. I continue to be impressed with the Entity-Component-System design pattern, which made this structuring pretty painless.

Now to get the knight to see (and subsequently chase) the player.

Well, I didn’t quite get to chasing… but the knight can see things now. I modeled is vision as an invisible, but still hitable, box – so it’s just a matter of adding a reaction to the player colliding with it.

Turning on one of the debug layers lets us see the vision cones in action.

Continue onto December 1st and 2nd