Devlog 2

Multiplayer had to be added to allow at least a local-coop for 1-2 players to be based on the original cart image, but at that point we can add multiple, so here is the game with 4 different characters! It’s nothing major, we just pass the currently active character to the controller function and if said character runs out of action we pass to the next one!

I was struggling with the combat system. Still no idea how to handle it correctly, but for the time being I mocked up a little combat window that will show your options!

I am planning on showing health and armor values for sure and the basic attack values of your weapons. Resting and healing will be also included but at this point special skills won’t fit on the screen. This is a puzzle to solve in the future, but the mockup already helps the creative juice flow.

The other big issue I had to solve is the drawing of entities. If you have multiple players in the game, it would only render one on top of all the others as there was no system in the game for that.

Now there is a system in place. Is it the smartest? No, does it work without much performance? Yes! Here is the algorithm and here is the rundown:

Basically we use a new collection, into I insert every entity that needs drawing like that, and some looping logic, check if the tile is already in the occupancy map, if it is, add the character to it, if not create a new space, and after that the algo loops around the occupied space, calculates how many entities there are in it, calculates a degree offset and finally draws them in a circle using the offset values.

This leads to a pretty nice effect, that only starts to look bad over 6 entities (imo) and I don’t plan on the game every having that many or even more entities on one tile at a time.