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 learned some stuff, but still. It’s frustrating.
As far as I can tell the navigation map generation is done – but I thought it was done once before, so I’m prepared to be unpleasantly surprised. Mostly what’s left, though, is working on the movement code for the entity, making sure it makes all of the jumps properly, making sure it doesn’t get confused about where it is and stop moving, making sure it doesn’t break when trying to jump from a weird angle, etcetera. In addition to those big tweaks, I also need to do a bunch of smaller ones, less vital for the navigation of the levels per se but more to tune up the feel of the movement — little pauses in between jumps and landings, a bit of acceleration and deceleration, just whatever I can think of to make the enemy’s movement more fluid, with more character
At the same time as I’m working on enemy movement in the programmatic sense, I’ll also start working on animating the movement of the sprite. This should provide some much needed relief from incessant pathfinding programming, as well as making the enemy come to life in a much more concrete way.
This has definitely taken too long, but so it goes. Hopefully once I get past this swamp I can start to build up momentum again.