This last week was very close to awesome. I ended up getting a ton of stuff working after fixing the movement code that was kicking my butt last week.
At this point you can move the hero around the dungeon and when he bumps up against crates and barrels he can smack them with his sword and break them apart (particle effect gives a pretty good break apart affect), spawning a “treasure” he can pick up. And when he bumps up against a treasure chest he’s given the option of smashing it open or picking the lock (the latter requires he found a lock pick earlier). Smashing open has a 75% chance of tripping a booby trap and damaging the hero.
During the prior period of flailing at code and gnashing of teeth, sprints were kind of put on the back burner, but this coming week (and afterwards) they’re back in vogue. Becoming more familiar with Scrum is probably going to be the biggest gain I get from this class.
Thinking Ahead Questions
- Starting to think more about combat — it has the potential to be a big time sink in order to get right. Probably need to write some user stories to try and nail down the specific needs.
- While I’m going to try to stick to Scrumming the rest of the project, I’m worried my inexperience with that will clog me up at the end. For a normal project with a deadline I’d normally work backwards so I’d know when something has to be done. Can I do that with Scrum? Separate the backlog into upcoming sprints?
- Pathfinding – I may have mentioned this before, but the need for it is coming up fast and I don’t find anything already done that I can plug in and use. The bad guys need to be able to move toward the hero when he arrives in a room and so some kind of pathfinding algorithm will be needed. I have the ability to create a grid of collider tiles, so I should be able to put something together, but I’ve never done pathfinding from scratch before. (Eeek!)
Time Spent This Week
Total time working on coding the movement and pickup routines was about 15 hours and another 2 hours of misc stuff (class, research, reading) for a total of about 17 hours spent on the project this week.
Weekly Total: 15 hours.
Project Total: 78 hours.