I’ve kind of been bouncing back and forth between making animations for this entity, trying to refine and build out the behavioral code, and going back and building out a production schedule. Animation-wise, I created a looking-around idle animation, a…
One appealing aspect of religion is that it lets us presume our world is crafted with the same care and intent that we put into our art. The difference here isn’t a matter of intelligent design vs unintelligent design – to…
All the pathfinding stuff is in a place where it’s basically functional, just needs tweaking to make it look nice. This is really just as much an aesthetic and design problem as it is a programming one at this point,…
Games tend to offer us questions just so they can supply the answers. In life, a vast amount of information is lost forever. Most of it is unimportant: For most people, it’s impossible to know, say, what they had for…
I’m super ready to be not working on pathfinding any more, but it keeps not being done. What was supposed to be a couple of weeks of work has turned into about a month of noodling. I feel like I…
What obligation do we have to our creations? In the film Ex Machina, the character Nathan, designer of an apparently fully conscious artificial intelligence, is shown through the story to be abusive to his creations, a tyrant, a monster. He…
Slow but steady progress this week, finding little bugs in the nav map building functions, introducing and fixing problems in the jump trajectory projection, and writing the code to interpret the navigation path and make the entity follow it. It’s…
There’s an issue I’ve noticed comes up a lot in game design, particularly when it comes to balancing items and abilities against each other: The differentiation and conflation of absolute and relative values. Here’s the first place I noticed it:…
Pathfinding is getting close to wrapping up I think. I’ve got the path selection algorithm working, and I think it’s properly detecting when there’s something blocking a chosen path and redirecting around it just as it should. However, testing has…
Dark souls is frequently described as masochistically difficult. I don’t think this is very apt: Masochism implies a state of being acted upon, of being made to suffer by an outside force. Dark Souls never makes you do anything, only…
