Yaaaaay! It’s Monday again! It’s probably going to be another fairly short and sweet “wot we’re up to” blog post this week, but there is a video. Not exactly the most tremendously exciting video you’ve ever seen, but a video none-the-less.

NPCs

This continues to thunder ahead. While we are still not ready to tip our hand with the NPC development, they are getting more and more solid as time goes on. Lemmy has been busy with adding a ton of behaviors into the NPCs brains, layered on each other with quite intricate priorities and behaviour sub-trees that mean that, for example, if an NPC requires an item, they will not only check their own backpack, their safehouse, or look out for the object on looting missions, but will also consider any ingredients that can be used to craft said items.

Basically, NPCs have the power to be completely aware of all crafting recipes and can just ‘desire’ an item and make it so. They can use backpacks flawlessly now, and may even have partaken in a little tree chopping and log sawing! There’s plenty more but we’ll save that for a later date. That said Binky did take a little time out from the map making to help the NPC cause by coding up a little zombie avoidance system in C# that Lemmy will port into the game. Since we’re nice here is a lovely video!

It’s a little hard to see in the video, but in the top-left corner is a counter for the number of times our heroic little green dot has found itself within scratching range – the fact that this number stays at zero is, therefore, really promising and does not indicate a bug with the scratch detection. I know this for certain, because the first version of the avoidance code saw this number climb to about 1,000 in about a minute. So that code was swiftly burned and replaced.

As you might glean from seeing the dots move around, little green dot fella is trying its damnedest to reach its little blue dot goal. In an in-game scenario, where the NPC will be trying to get will change depending on many, many factors – so they won’t be prone to stubbornly trying to get somewhere ridiculous, such as the middle of about 200 zombies. Also, unlike this green dot, NPCs will be capable of engaging and killing zombies. So this video in many ways represents a “worst case scenario” especially since in this test-bed, zombies have perfect line-of-sight visibility and only stop chasing the green dot when they’re extremely far away.

Map Expansion

Development on the map is going at a nice pace, with the trio Mash, Binky and Ringo all working at it. Mash recently made a building that’s a little inhospitable due to the large number of infected types that congregated there in the early days of the outbreak. Binky also had to spend some time making sure there were exactly 18 of what he was making.

The Bit At The End Where We Plug Stuff

Firstly, the glorious Mighty Tactical Shooter is almost half-way to its Kickstarter goal, with 17 days remaining. There’s a demo on the Kickstarter page, so if you fancy finding out how a turn-based tactical arcade shooter actually plays you can find out there, and then consider pledging.

Secondly, huuuuuuuuge congratulations to our friends at Ironward on their Steam Early Access release of The Red Solstice. You can snap it up now at a whopping 40% off until the 24th July. So if real-time strategy RPGs are your thing, definitely check it out!

Don’t forget, you can get all our announcements and Mondoids in an e-mail lovingly deposited into your favourite e-mail client using this handy form!