What’s New?

This week the object placement system was implemented alongside some necessary changes to accommodate it. In world UI was also given to all the NPCs to indicate how much fear they are feeling.

Object Placement

The object placement system places down an object snapping to the navmesh. This is achieved by a click and drag system rather than a toggle system. The system currently does not support rotation of the object. The objects getting placed down are navmesh obstacles, so this automatically covers object clipping and NPC collision. This does lead to a scenario where the player can completely seal off a doorway. A solution for this has been implemented.

If an NPC has a partial path when trying to move into a different room the obstacle nature of the offending object is removed. This allows NPC to walk straight through these obstacles. The navigation system’s partial path will lead to the closest navmesh position to the destination. This leads to incorrect navigation on L shaped rooms. However, the even under the worst case scenarios this system holds up reasonably well and eventually the path will be cleared.

I have chosen to ignore blocked navigation within the same room because if a section of a room is blocked off (but is not critical to overall game flow) because it just doesn’t matter and will occur fairly commonly. I do hope that players will try to create mazes of props and intentionally try to obstruct movement so I will need to develop a visual indicator that an object is being walked over.

Object Activation

The scaffold for object activation has been implemented. When an object placed in the world during the prep phase is clicked on in the spook phase a debug function is activated. I will need to implement effects for doing so and also an in world UI object to indicate that the object can be clicked on.

Fear UI

Once an NPC has been scared a bar appears above their head. This bar uses placeholder sprites and is comprised of 2 separate bars. There is a bar for regular fear capacity and a second bar that appears around the main bar to indicate the decaying over-fear.

What’s next?

Next is to create the effects for clicking on an object. Once this is implemented the core gameplay loop will be fully implemented and all that remains is art jail and design variety.