So, my little toy/game in progress, Maze Raider, has come along quite nicely so far. I was feeling ambitious and thought, “It’s time to put some enemies into the game.” Then I started wondering which script should be responsible for that. There was an “easy” place to put it, but the name of the script (MazeGenerator) didn’t seem to logically fit with enemy placement. And beside that issue, I started thinking about the problem of having an automated agent inside of a procedurally generated maze do path finding towards a moving target (the player)…that was going to be a tough one.
I was about to dive back into some of the old artificial intelligence algorithms I learned last year, but I still had a nagging itch about the whole design of the code. My inner software engineer was telling me that things could be better. So, I’m going to rebuild the game…again. It should be better this time. My hope is that the level generator will generalize to other, less-boxy “rooms” so that I can use it in the future for more sophisticated games. There are also things I don’t like about how I handle the multiple camera views on the player that I’m going to find a better solution for. I’m also taking this opportunity to get some polymorphic class hierarchy going, at least for the power-ups.
In any case, what I’m saying is, the reason my version releases have slowed down is because I’m not just making little improvements…I’m redoing the majority of the game.
Like my younger brother and I often say, “It’s always easier the third time.”
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