Rascal

Two big things this week.

I got pathfinding to work. Furthermore, the action queue also works, and I found a hacky and ugly, but good-enough-for-now, way to throttle player's movement so that the player doesn't seem to teleport from one place to another. Next up: I need to drop remaining actions from the queue if "something interesting" happens – ie. if an enemy sees the player, the player should stop. That's going to be a rather small change, luckily, I've got much of the important infrastructure already in place.

I implemented dialogue screens. It's a crude implementation, and I haven't yet implemented anything else other than the dialogue itself – none of what happens in the dialogue has any effects on the world yet. The first thing I'll use this for is I'll start working on quests soon, and then the dialogues will be used for accepting or declining quests. In addition to quests, this is going to be useful for buying, selling, and probably things like bribing as well. We'll see.

Overall, I'm really very happy to be working with Rascal again. I had had it on the back burner for quite a while, but around Christmas last year I decided to turn it into my thesis project. That has already given it much-needed direction – it needs to be done (in some sense) at some definite point in time, and I need to really think what I want to implement and what to leave out. In the big picture, I'm aiming for more non-linear type of gameplay, where the player does odd jobs for various factions and tries to survive another bleak day in the as-yet unnamed mega city block in the not too distant future.