Hi, welcome back. It’s been 2 weeks because of travel and my kids got me sick. Fortunately, Michel has been trucking along and making things work. So now I get to brag about his work and take all the credit. Don’t worry, he’s used to it.

Getting Things Moving

To make the world feel alive things have to move around. A monster hunting party needs to chase you across the map until it loses interest or your scent. An NPC trader moving along the road from one town to another.

We already have monster patrols moving around on the map, now we need to expand it to handle any kind of event. There are some additional challenges.

1. Order of Operation?

When do the events move?

After the player moves of course! That’s every rogue-like evar.

But if every moving event moves after you, how do you notice what moved and what didn’t? We need to animate the NPC movement. And do we wait for the animation to finish before allowing you to move again? That slows down gameplay a lot, starts to feel sluggish. So we’re going to keep the simultaneous movement for now… except when we shouldn’t!

What happens when you move onto a hex with a moving event, and it chooses to move to a different hex. Technically you would miss each other, but that will feel sucky, so now we have to determine which events have their movement turn interrupted by the player.

2. Stacking?

If events can move around, what happens if they both go into the same hex? Is that even allowed?

If you move into a hex with 2 events, which one is shown first?

We decided anything dangerous happens first: deal with the monsters THEN the resource or NPC conversation.

3. Where do Events Move to?

Figuring out where the roads are, placing an event, and giving them a path to follow to the town are additional challenges.

A monster patrol will enter into a chase mode where you can use terrain and spells to hide from them, if that is what you want. I hope this makes going through dangerous monster territory more thrilling.

We’re getting close to the end of the tech work on this feature and focus on the experience of it.