I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed. Once in a while I realize that some part of this project is going to be a lot more work than I’d really considered, and I’m getting that feeling thinking about creating the different enemy types in the game. Like, all of the care I’ve been taking to make sure the player character moves just right, in the most intuitive and satisfying way, and interacts with the levels just right – I pretty much need to do all of that for each enemy type I add to the game, make each distinct and discrete and recognizable. It’s kind of a big deal.
So I think a big part of what I need to do over the next couple weeks is start designing enemies in-depth: Like, not just basically what they’ll look like and what attacks they have, but concept sketches and pseudo-code directives so I know exactly what each one is going to be like and hopefully have a leg up on developing them in the code itself.
Other than that it’s been kind of a lot of little things this week. I sketched out the first area of the game in the level builder, and decided that the tile editor needed a few more features, so I added a clickable mini-map to help with navigation, a flood-fill tool, and the ability to flip chunks of level horizontally/vertically or to invert sections. In building out the level I found a few more situations where the collision detection breaks, so that’s something I’m going to have to figure out at some point here, but I really wanted to get away from the collision stuff for a bit just because it’s fucking terrible for my morale to work on the same relatively small section of code for weeks on end.
I’m currently working on the first, and likely simplest, test enemy now, which is a bit finicky and frustrating but is also, you know, kind of important. While all of the other enemies in the game will probably be more complex than this first one, just knowing what kind of groundwork I’ll have to lay to make a new enemy should be a big relief. Just not knowing the approximate dimensions of a task makes it way more intimidating and difficult to feel motivated to tackle – that’s a big reason of why I want to start planning out all the enemies in detail now, so that when it comes time to implement them I don’t feel lost.
Anyway, not a great week, not a bad week, just a week. I think that as I understand a bit better what all I’m working on next and how I want to work on it, I should be able to pick up some momentum.