Feature Update

A quick update on some feature changes from the second half of September.

The monster invasion on floating platforms wasn’t working out in a way I was happy with. With the rebuilding of the game on a minimalistic codebase, I played around with the terrain block. I have also been playing a lot of tower defense games, looking for what the fun is in them. With these influences, I decided to prototype a level based on the ground / terrain. It only took a couple of hours to migrate the bare features of Templar Skies to this new codebase and level design, and things worked very well. I had a solid, working game which for the first time in ages felt like something coherent.

Playing Tower Defense games, plus reading through some excellent design blogs, made me realize I was still attempting too much. In this case, it was the monster AI. I’ve spend many, many hours trying to get various solutions to work, without anything being reliable enough to make it in. Then I realized I was over-engineering – a lot of TD games make do with a simple path the monsters follow. This was already in Torque, and worked like a charm. The new AI model will be very simple – not all monsters will attack, and the ones which do, will move away from the main path, and stand stationary while they used their magical ranged attack – in effect becoming temporary towers for the demon side. To finally get this resolved is a great relief, as the AI was the single biggest headache feature.

So now Templar Skies levels are much more simpler. Monsters follow a fixed path across terrain, so no platforms, or pathfinding to worry about. Attacking AI has been simplified greatly, and the code for it already exists. This also reduces the complexity and bug-potential of these systems. It also makes level design and building a lot easier.