Yep, I tried to attend this month Ludum Dare during the last weekend. I admit it, I haven’t tried it hard enough. I guess I had too much in my head these days, preparing to get back to work and stuff, and then I lost time. Thing is, I wasn’t convinced about the concept too. Being the theme “enemies as weapons”, I thought about a game in which you need to avoid those creatures and kick them when hidden in their shell to crash them. Something similar to Pengo, but with shelled animals.
So, I started to code the AI routine for these little critters. I tried something simple: they just walk in a random direction until they find an obstacle (an other animal or the screen border, for now). Plus, every 2 seconds, they have 50% chance of stopping and hiding in their shell. They stop for about three seconds, then start moving again.
That was pretty it. At first, I coded the movement routine for one of the critters. When I tried to add more, the disaster happened. All the critters went bananas, some of them flickering randomly through the screen, some others getting stuck against walls, all of them ignoring the collisions between them. I didn’t have a clue about where the bug was, and the time was running out. So I decided to give up and try again next time, and try it harder, with less distractions.
Still, I am no coder, and sometimes this is pretty hard. But if this helps me to learn something, so be it.
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