Thursday, January 20, 2011

Alert Levels

First, the bad news. Definitely won't be getting anything out by tomorrow. Look for something next Friday.
Next, the progress update.

For esoteric reasons that I cannot recall, it became imperative to me to figure out the spawning system. Now, I left it out of the previous demo because I didn't have time to properly figure it out; the AI movement overruled the player's decisions (since the system was basically you possessing one of the NPCs) and made player movement next to impossible. So I obviously needed to fix that. My first thought was to make a schedule chart (at 7:30, if the player is not the doctor, send the doctor towards the med bay, stuff like that). However, this is a terrible solution. Why? Because, in the middle of a disaster, if the time is 7:30, the doctor will, no matter what is happening around him, look at his watch and dash off to work.
So, I threw in an extra layer of checks. There's now an "alert system". Disasters will raise the alert level (by differing amounts based on the severity of the disaster). Depending on the danger level, NPCs might be pointed towards repairing areas of the ship, pulling in from the ocean, or straight-up evacuating. At some point I'll also want to get it so that there are different sorts of alerts; food poisoning won't freak the mechanic out, but the doctor will be rerouted to the clinic.

Speaking of the mechanic, I wrote his dialogue today. I won't tell you exactly what his default response is, but I will tell you he is very invested in constantly tweaking the machinery.

3 comments:

  1. Looking forward to the next demo, my only problem with the last one was that there was no way to look around a room for items, or there were no Items to pick up.

    Other than that, keep up the good work!

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  2. Holy shit, you actually update pretty frequently. I wanna thank you so much for all the work you've been putting in. You're awesome, bro.

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