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Getting things done on the game and moving four hundred miles with a house full of stuff don't quite go together. But things are back to normal.
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Getting things done on the game and moving four hundred miles with a house full of stuff don't quite go together. But things are back to normal.
Between some backpacking, traveling, and contract work, I spent the last two weeks getting hunting working properly. Animals roam around the area in herds. By placing a hunters lodge, you can set an area that hunters will explore in search of game. If they get close, they'll kill the deer and bring them back to storage for the towns people to eat. The number of deer is dependent on the size of undeveloped land. As your city expands, the deer population decreases. Too many hunters will also decrease the population of deer.
I clipped together a short video showing some of Banished's artwork and gameplay. Enjoy.
[singlepic id=44 w=240 float=left] This last week consisted of less content and functionality being added that I hoped, but that seems to be the way of game development. Some weeks tend to be a flurry of new things being added, and other weeks, a single code bug takes three days to fix. To sum up, I re-textured the deer to look better, rigged their bone hierarchy, and animated walk cycles and idles. The livestock and wild animals now use the same ai and movement code, and support moving around in herds. The wild animals will avoid passing through and grazing in developed areas, unless that is the only way to get where they want to go. I also started work on a hunters lodge, which will be placed as a base area around which hunters will stalk the wild animals for food.
While I've worked on video games professionally for about ten years, this type of game is not quite like software I've previously written. The major difference is in the number of objects that are dynamic. Of the ones I've worked on, they tend to have a large portion of the environment built of large static parts that don't ever change. This is typical in FPS games. There tend to be something like ten or twenty enemies at once and that's about it.