AWOL...Reflection...Inspiration
OK. I dropped the ball. No updates in 2 weeks. Quite a shame, considering how on track everything seemed. The reason is a rather annoying bug of which I still don't know the cause. You see, the save button in the level editor is currently rigged to turn the entire level into text and display it. The output has a few extra characters in it. I will take another look at the whole process and see if I can solve it. I may try some experiments. But I intend to get to the heart of it or at least find a workaround.
What inspired me to continue was the rediscovery of some paper notes on my original ideas for MeshMaze. At the time, it was just called Maze. (I'm still not entirely happy with the name.) Well aware of the mantra of release early and often, I outlined the minimum of features my game needs:
- movement
- walls
- gates
- items
- attacking
- enemies
- scrolling
So, I'm far along. There's movement, walls, doors (close enough), and scrolling. Currently, there is only one type of item, keys, so this needs to be tweaked. The land mine almost counts, but I can't truly claim having the enemy feature until there is moving opposition. All in all, I am only completely missing one feature on this list, attacking--unless you count vaporizing gates with keys. This actually brings up an interesting point. I could actually put the existing gate/key dynamic to another use, weapons and enemies. The keys are your ammo, and when a certain color runs out, the gates of that color become deadly to you. Smarter instances of gates would know when to go after you and when to run from you based on your current "keyring".
It's an advanced form of Pac-Man with Sokoban baked right in.
