2022-02-20

Cultures of Chaos (day 3)

11:00am

Back into it for the day, down to the last 10ish hours before submission time!

I think I want to tweak the pathfinding algorithm a bit to keep enemies from getting too close to each other.

11:45am

Fixed up the pathfinding algorithm a bit by adding in a proximity-based patrol mechanism. This really improves the feel of the game!

1:00pm

Just returning from a lunchbreak, jumping in.

2:45pm

I set up random health (algae) spawning, and consuming it restores a bit of health. With that piece done, I started jamming on setting up player death, but I just ran into my first use-after-free error, so time to figure that one out...

3:00pm

That was a silly error, my pathfinding algorithm just needed to be updated to check to see if the 'meeba was dead or not. Next up, random enemy spawning.

3:30pm

Just added the background music, oh man this is great.

4:00pm

Starting on roughing in a "start screen"

6:00pm

Okay, I think I'm ready to ship this thing.

7:00pm

I ran into an issue when exporting HTML5 - some of my PNG assets were missing. Reimporting them seems to have solved the issue. The project is now live on itch.io

7:45pm

Submitted! This was a great experience, I really enjoyed it! At the time of submission there were 775 other folks in the jam, I'm curious to see what the final submission count is.

Lessons learned? This was a ton of fun, I'm not sure if there were any noteworthy lessons here, it wasn't too different from my other software projects: you need to be disciplined in your design/implementation. One thing that _was_ surprisingly great was writing code that wasn't going to be released open source. Don't get me wrong, I strongly believe in open source, it is just nice writing code that wasn't public. My rat's nest of code was very cozy.

© 2025 Matthew Ryan Dillon