One Day after submission: It is hard to see from inside
One day later, and not being in doing and in hurry, you suddenly see some things so clear and it makes you wonder how come it is so hard to see some things from inside when they are so obvious from outside.
One of the things I decided right at beginning was that I wouldnt use my time to make a save game feature. I figured it would take too much time (not sure why i thought so) and I also figured I would make game short enough that it wouldnt really need one.
In last day as I noticed I had problem with my levels 3.5, I was wondering how to do with them, wether to include them or not, and then Finally I came to idea of after completing level 2, all levels become available. I am not sure that was a good idea at all, since due to lack of time in putting any proper instructions to player, this might create even more confusion, but I was just really wanting to show what I was after basically.
Now thinking from outside it really annoys me to notice how easy the solutions (yes, i figured two of them) had been.
Solution 1: I am using this "timepassed" variable which takes the amount of time passed during each cycle and based upon that it counts how much each unit moves. This is connected to the problem. When it takes too long for a cycle to perform, things might move too far and pass their targets, and therefore when it keeps checking if target tile is reached, it never returns true, as they already passed it.
Simple solution: If timepassed is more than 0.1 seconds, then change timepassed variable into 0.1 second. This way game would slow down on those spots, but at least everything would be working otherwise fine. Especially since most times this problem was that when you changed a command, and all Robots did new pathfinding, that is why it took so long. So likely it had most of time made just that one slow cycle, and after that things had been running usual speed again. So not that big a deal actually from players point of view, and time to take to implement, well, one line of code: "If timepassed>100 then timepassed = 100" . So so annoying to notice such a simple and obvious solution but too late.
Solution 2: Save game. I just dont get it how was I thinking save game as being too difficult and time taking. I have done save game before, so I must have been thinking something difficult there.
Had I stopped to think about it, all I had to do was to save if some level is available or not, and with how many robots to play it with. That had been all needed. Like 20 minute job to add it. This way even if game had crashed at level three, you would have just restarted the game and continued from that level. Annoying and minust points from stability-sure, but it would have made the game better still since you would have actually needed to play all five levels and only after level five had "execute plan" appeared, and it wouldnt have been so confusing to the player.
I am posting couple other posts too, decided to make them separate topics.