Late last week I made a good start on the programming for the Snowsquatch Frost Breath ability. The graphics aren’t done so no video of that yet.
Earlier this week I implemented moving platforms which involved taking the grid-based collision/physics engine and updating it to allow collisions with arbitrarily positioned entities (which was also required for Mimeo to be able to interact with frozen entities).
The past two days were spent on miscellaneous graphic updates and some new sprites (one of which, an 8-bit Kiddo fleeing after being rescued by Mimeo, is shown above).
Today I rewrote entity management. Previously when a level was loaded all entities were created, added to the map and ran on the same update cycle—whether they were on screen/map or not. This led to two issues. First, the most obvious, is that the game was running lots of logic that had no impact on the onscreen action on every frame. The second, most problematic issue was that locomotive entities placed at the end of the level were moving on (eg. towards the center of the level, down holes, or otherwise off map) before the player could encounter them. Now entities are only created and added to the map when their spawn point is within a few tiles of the visible area and removed when venturing beyond that extended region.
