The Unknowable
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…
EverEnding DevBlog 133: Paving the Way
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…
Self-Aware
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…
EverEnding DevBlog 132: Finding Ways
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…
Balancing Numbers
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:…
EverEnding DevBlog 131: Obstruction and Instruction
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…
Listen
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…
EverEnding DevBlog 130: Maps and Territories
Spent all week working on pathfinding stuff. This is, realistically, probably something I shouldn’t be spending this much time on. I’m getting sidetracked. Still, getting sidetracked like this on difficult but interesting problems is good for me, at least in…
???
I ran out of time and the work I had wasn’t coming together so no post today. Here’s another compensatory music that I made last month.
EverEnding DevBlog 129: Pathways
Progress has been going slow, but it’s progressing. I’ve been slowly building up the behavior code for this enemy type, but I realized a couple of days ago that I’m probably going to need a robust pathfinding solution rather than…