Day 4 of #NoFreeGameJam

The last few days have been spent wrestling with pathfinding. 

Desktopia has a huge single road (between 50k and 150k pixels) and we've decided that the whole thing needs to be active at the same time in order for it to really be classed as a simulation. With hundreds of active villagers, heroes, and enemies moving at the same time a non-memory expensive solution was required, and one that didn't break our self determined rule not to cheat the simulation!

After various attempts at creating smart pathfinding solution we were almost ready to give up: lag became a serious problem once the village began to grow. Finally, a solution which we called 'Dumb Pathfinding', combined with some imaginative use of npc hitboxes, has allowed us to move on from this difficult early part of the project.  As you can see in the video, villagers now go about their business with no issues!

For some perspective on how long the Desktopia road is: each plot (house, church mine) is just 384 pixels.  That's a lot of houses, and every plot spawns a unique villager who has their own business to attend! 

Another thing we've been working on is separate game windows.

Obviously, we can't clutter up the small screen of Desktopia with a lot of HUD, so we've settled on  separate windows that can be opened and closed. The tech tree, village overview, purchase screen, and log will all have one of these windows. In the video you can see an early form of the log, logging the villagers movements as they go about their daily lives!