The Gruen Effect - Progress Devlog 5

This week the focus of my development was enemies and having an actual game loop (a condition to end the game). I did this by stealing lifting the node system from the weekly tutorials on A* several weeks back. This system allowed easy implementation of an object that would follow the player along set paths throughout an environment.

After implementing the enemy's AI successfully, I found that it would get stuck on corners, sometimes clipping into shelves or being unable to follow certain paths. It took me some time to realise why this was. All objects in the game are represented in physics by a parallelogram filling a certain amount of squares on the game's grid, in order to sell the illusion of a hypothetical 3D space on a 2d plane. Because the enemies had colliders equivalent in size to their sprites, they were not only much larger than all other colliders in the game, but also at the complete wrong angles to slot into the diagonal lines on aisle entrances and the like. Changing the collider shape and size immediately solved these problems.

I also set up the enemies to take away from the player's 'paycheck', initiating a game over sequence whenever the player ran out of money. Game testing proved that the number of enemies that a player could juggle at once varied quite a bit between subjects, so I opted to make an enemy spawner that introduces them over time to ensure every player can be uniquely challenged per run. The majority of players also expressed difficulty keeping track of enemies in the environment, an issue I hope replacing placeholder graphics will solve.