A lot of today was setting up what is to come later. I did a bunch of thought about how I wanted non-player interaction to work. I basically sat down and enumerated through all the different things I wanted players to be able to interact with. Those things included NPCs, Shops, Resource Nodes, Random Objects, Enemies, and Obstacles.

So I spent a lot of time hammering out the skeleton of what those should look like generally, and came up with a fairly clean approach. To prove that the approach worked, I ended up placing a few more NPCs down in the scene with the player for testing. They don’t do anything exciting yet, but eventually the green guy will have a little dialogue with you, and the blue guy will sell items to you.

But if I’ve got G and B, I surely need R.

By request from someone who joined my stream, I randomly decided to hard pivot away from dialogue and into combat. Or rather some of the system that will eventually become combat.

Enemies will appear in the world, wander around, chase you if you get too close, retreat if you get too far, and fight you if they catch you. I implemented almost all of that behaviour … I’m still working on how I want to implement wandering around.

But since chasing and retreating works, at least, it gave me a fun excuse to give you guys gifs.

I’m not sure what I’ll end up working on as the weekend progresses. I’m delaying working on the actual combat system because it feels too big, and the dialogue system because it feels like it’s going to be an absolute pain in the ass, but I’m sort of running out of feasible ways to delay them.