Today is another really good day for Helpless Island. I managed to make both the boy and girl “Children” sprites, and have coded them all to work together!

I ran into several problems that I managed to fix eventually;

The worst of them being the children and determining their “mother” which in reality is a variable. I couldn’t figure out why 1 in any random number of children would just all of a sudden not be able to figure out who their mother is (because they carry over her name for use in their own). It turned out the first problem was I accidentally duplicated the code where I created an instance of a child. Oops.

Then again when they grew up from baby to child, they would have trouble figuring out the mother again. It turned out when I was assigning a mother to one child, I was actually reassigning it to all child’s. So I defined the mother to be just assigned to one at a time.

Then if the mother died before the baby was a child the child wouldn’t be able to get any information from the mother (because that instance was removed). So I threw in a condition that if the mother died before the baby grew up it’s child name would be “Someone’s boy/girl” rather than “mothersname’s boy/girl”. Then I thought, man, batmans parents were killed when he was young. I think I’ll use this later and give stat bonus’s/ penalties to children who suffer from this.

Those were the really big ones. After that it was just cleaning up the code and making sure they all work together.

So in conclusion today’s accomplishments were;

Babies grow up into children now

There are nice sprites for children (with clothing because I wasn’t drawing naked kids)

Children behave erratically, they run all over and then sometimes (every second it is a 1/100 chance) check in with mom before running off again.

That is a small list, but it was really a lot of background work. Also managed to eat 3.5 grilled cheeses today; go to the gym; and ride in the firetruck. Oh, then I played “King of the Castle” where I pretend to be a sleeping king and my son’s sneak up on me and steal my sword because it’s magic. Then a pursuit ensues. Being laid off from the factory really is nice!

And now or soon I will go to bed, and be back in the morning with something new to accomplish! Thanks for reading.