Well, I made an improved version of the throwing animation prototype. This is normally the place where I would embed a gif of the animation, but like a true creative genius I completely failed to save the finished version of the file and lost it right after exporting the frames. The good news, I suppose, is that since these are just prototype animations once it comes time to build the finished frames I can just import those frames into the sprite program and build the final animation from there. The corresponding bad news is that I’m going to have to redo a bunch of the work if I want to make this entity’s animations genuinely two-sided rather than just flipping the frames.
All in all, it’s a mistake I’d rather I hadn’t made.
Well, whatever. It hasn’t been a very productive week, since most of it has just been about improving things I did last week. There were problems in the trajectory calculations which I spent an embarrassing amount of time hammering my head against, and those have been fixed. There were problems with the throwing animation which I think I’ve addressed, though not without creating additional problems which I’ve just mentioned. I’ve been feeling suboptimal about my own creative abilities and stressed out and anxious, so the last couple of days I’ve been mostly taking as vacation as far as EverEnding is concerned.
I don’t know. I guess progress is getting made.
Anyway, this alternate enemy version is at least getting close to done. I need to tweak the AI a bit so it chases the player when provoked, but only a short distance before returning to its origin position: The current pursuit code will pursue as long as it can, rather than breaking off pursuit based on an overall strategy, so that’s an obvious place to improve this type of ranged enemy. The animations for throwing are basically ready to go now, but the supporting animation-playing code isn’t quite where it needs to be yet, since there isn’t an easy way to tell the difference between which attack animation is supposed to be played at run-time, so that’s something I’m going to have to address in the way the enemy is set up. All in all it’s a bunch of easy tasks which, added together, become rather stressful and overwhelming — but, well, that’s game dev for ya.