Common Interface for Actor Objects

This month there isn’t really anything visual that’s changed with my turn-based dungeon crawler. Instead, this past month has been a lot of invisible structural work. For example, there hadn’t been any way to complete a dungeon and start a new one, so I added in an end location to reach. Meanwhile, I’ve also been doing a lot of refactorings and code cleanup, one of which I want to highlight in this post.

Specifically, I created an interface for the various interactive objects to share. While it’s not where I learned of this programming construct, the following video is a pretty good explanation of what I did:

WIP Random Monsters, Combat, and Loot

Last month I showed off grid-based movement in a randomly generated dungeon, but now I’ve added the beginnings of combat, the beginnings of loot/treasure, and (most crucially) randomly generated monster sprites! Here are screenshots of the enemies taken from different play sessions:

Grid-based movement for both Player and Enemies

Last month I had implemented dungeon generation for my first-person roguelike/RPG game, but it wasn’t populated yet, nor could you move around it. Well, I’ve since programmed that stuff.

Two additions: BSP dungeons and A* pathfinding

As I blogged about a couple months ago, I’m writing a little RPG for a fun hobby project. I was inspired by this twitter thread about a random monster generator, and I designed a tabletop rule system to use. Since then I’ve been implementing things in Unity, and this month I want to talk about the first two things I programmed: procedural dungeon generation, and grid-based A* (or A-star) pathfinding.

Post-GDC Recap

I was at GDC last week! Qualcomm sent me to help staff their booth. I wrote some of the demos after all, so I could answer questions about the demos. I met a ton of people there, with several people standing out as especially notable/unexpected. I already tweeted about these encounters, so I’ll just post those tweets:

New RPG system and More zombie action

Two biggish (well, big enough to blog about) updates from last month: the enemies in Train Zombies now fight back, and I’ve been designing a new RPG system for a game project.

Train Zombies

I made a little 3rd-person prototype about fighting zombies in a trainyard. Play it in your browser on itch.io

AI state machine w/ waypoints

After seeing the most recent asset drop from Quaternius I decided to make a little game with it while on holiday. Well, I quickly realized I would need AI code for the enemy characters, so I whipped up a little demo of an AI character controlled with a state machine and waypoints.

Talk on Procedural Generation in Unity

Very brief post: I’m doing a talk at this meetup tomorrow!

Early thoughts on Shader Graph

I’ve started working a bit with the new Shader Graph in Unity (mostly because I’ve started using URP) so I just want to share some early observations. TL;DR I’m a bit leery of Shader Graph right now and am finding I’d rather just write the shaders manually as I have been.