Day 3: Trust
No ball chasing today, sorry. I did manage to program an avoidance zone, where if the animal detects you in it, they will move away from you.
The idea was to decrease the size of their flight distance as their trust in you increases, and increase the size if their trust decreases. However, I had trouble getting the size of the avoidance zone to change at runtime, perhaps due to a bug or my own lack of knowledge, so a workaround might be to just toggle the zone on and off.
I also programmed the ability for the dog to follow you or anything on command, which they will stop doing if they are given another command or get distracted by something. Right now, the only thing that can distract them is the player getting too close, but in the future there may be other distractions.
Tomorrow, the plan is to continue working on the AI for the animal and give the player object ways to interact with the animal. Maybe the promised ball throwing, but then again, maybe not.
Day 2: Road Bumps
Today was a slow day for me. Nothing really much to show visually except this:
When the animal is idle, it will now wander around a bit. This was part of expanding the AI capabilities of the animal, which was the task for the day. They can also now attack in all directions and move intelligently to their target. I haven't added pathfinding around obstacles yet, but that's for another time.
I got stuck today trying to make an inventory management system for the player, which I ended up shelving for later. This took time from some of the other tasks I wanted to work on, unfortunately, but I still gained some knowledge.
Tomorrow the plan is to go to my real job, and then once I'm done with that, flesh out the training system. Maybe I can make the dog chase a ball?
(edit) I forgot, I also wrote a piece of music. I was originally going to write just an overworld theme, but I ended up writing a piece of music which probably won't fit in the game at all, but which I enjoyed writing ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Day 1: Basic Movement
Today saw a lot of progress, most of which will be unseen because it didn't produce much in the way of gameplay. Basically, today was a day for laying the foundation. I set up project folders, created basic sprites, and laid the groundwork for future features. As always, things I thought would be easy took a while and things that I thought might be hard took no time at all.
However, I did get a few cool things done today: player movement, animal movement, and basic collisions. Shoutouts to GDQuest and HeartBeast, whose excellent Godot tutorials on YT saved me a lot of time.
Player movement: the player can move using WASD, which is simple enough. Godot also has built in functions which make colliding easy. The player can run into this house. Not only that, Godot also has an easy way of rendering top-down games so that the player sprite renders in front or behind appropriately.
Animal movement: this is where things get tricky. The dog needs to remember its destination and stop at the right spot. In the future, they will also need to be able to transition between moving, idle, attacking, etc. on command from the AI, so some work today went to setting up a state machine to control the movement. I had not done much in the way of object-oriented state machines, so this was tricky for me. I ended up creating a more detailed sprite so that I could better visualize the dog's movement, and while I was at it gave it very basic animations.
Tomorrow's task is to convince the animal to be able to attack in all directions. I cheated in the above gif: right now the dog can only attack right. Anyways, if I finish that, I will start coding the animal's AI, hopefully giving it a mind of its own.
