The Rise of Dagon: Weekly update August 2, 2014

Greetings!

This week's update is progress on the level format, level logic and the inevitable collision of the two.

As previously mentioned I've made preliminary efforts at laying down levels in code which worked out quite well.

I also mentioned working on level logic ; the bit that ties the things you can see, to what you are allowed to do.

Those items are coming very close to meeting in the middle now however I found that I actually had quite a bit of a mess as I had been slapping things together in a way that was taken from the 'just get things working' angle and now that it was time to stitch them together it was just obviously a bit too messy to work with.

I don't believe in over-optimizing at the beginning but I also know a mess when I see it! So I spent a good bit of time this week condensing the code from about 10 classes in to 3-4 classes and eliminating several class members from the primary logical class as they ended up being redundant as I saw how things were cleaning up.

Here's a quick screenshot of a mostly optimized  bit of logic inserted in to an array:

I was in fact still working on it, I had some public variables that ended up private later and the getter/setter properties are all that you can see for most of them now when you inspect it.

So starting Friday I have been doing testing where I use my current level code to insert a bit of the logic, and then I have a gameobject that I click on that prints out in a debug statement if the logic matches what it should be.  

The tests have gone well so this coming week I will begin integrating the level construction  with the level logic!

This task is complex enough I expect it to take more than a week, and I am very much wondering if its time to write a first pass file format for this or not? I would prefer to wait longer because I'm sure the format is going to change as I explore more .. but at some point I'm just going to need it! In any case I'm attempting to delay that decision until it becomes clear that its needed to proceed.

Thanks for reading, see you next week!