1. Okay, the visual thing where the lambs would glitch to the other side was resolved much easier than I'd expected: turns out, thats just where they were 16 frames ago, and my method for making the sprites not appear in the first 16 seconds of entering a room (switching the sprite image to a transparent block) was being overwritten. So I just put that sucker into a list so that it would act like my other sprite catalogues
2. MULTI LAMB CAPABILITY!!! This was my main focus for today (#1 fix was serendipitous, as I was cleaning up this one, I noticed it was a quick fix). This was complicated because it involves moving the lambs to a separate group in order to make their behavior supercede their spawn rooms (because unlike the player, they are spawned in using the text map, while the singular player is spawned in over it). This part was the most complicated part. Additionally, I increased the offset for the following sheep: 1 is still 16, but 2 is 32, 3 is 48 frames behind, and so on, so that the sheep weren't always on top of each other. one of the penultimate issues I was facing was that sometimes, the lamb counter was going up inexplicably, but what I realized was that it was grabbing sheep from other rooms (because the lambs existed above the rooms in the code, so they were physically there, but just not being drawn). So I put in a little check to make sure the room variable is the same as the sheeps room variable before it can be collected. (I don't like collected, because even though you are nominally gaining multible lambs, they're more individuals than objects... entrained? they can be entrained? I'm inspired by the pokemon move, though the textbook definition about air bubbles is a... stretch. but lets go pokemon here and call the process entrainment)
as of this point the only issues with the lambs are (knock on wood):
1. the lambs jumpcutting to 16/32/48 frames behind the sheep from its collection position. this isn't That Big of a deal so I might just leave it.
2. the lambs will sometimes vibrate up and down by a pixel or less. I think this may be caused by gravity displacement enabled during entrainment? wait let me check.... its not. um but again, this isn't that big of a deal, in fact probably less of a deal cause you have to look super closely to notice
3. i didn't think about drawing order very hard so some lambs may be above the sheep and some below. The relative order stays the same, im fairly certain, and it doesn't really change anything about their behavior so again: No Big Deal.
In summation: minor visual things that I probably won't fix.
Not to abandon my game for today, but I am hanging out with some friends today which means limited productivity (no more limited than a day that I have to go to work or something though)
so in the spare time before i leave (in about an hour, minus prep stuff) and when I get back (9 or 10 to when I go to sleep, 11 if im smart, so probably midnight) I will work on a tileset. If i manage to finish (or if I prototype a lazy undetailed filler tileset), i will start implementation of the tile rules (these will likely be made as methods under the platform class) (ALSO yeah yeah so ive been putting of level design so what at least i have semifunctioning mechanics)
So without further ado: (you can see what I mean by the jumpcut with the entrainment of the second sheep)
:
see y'all tonight