Video shows the summary, text shows the technical!
This week:
Chickens
Hunger
Chickens
The first few weeks of making a game are so critical because it's when you are laying the foundation of the game. So despite me working towards just a simple behavior as "Find chickens and move to them", given the novelty of the rendering methods and memory-optimized storage, I had to do a fair amount of refactoring to setup the game for the future and for today's presentation.
Chickens will be animals found in the wild. They are wholly peaceful creatures and they don't do anything (yet) outside of eating grass. But your wolf children can be curious beasts and will approach them randomly if they aren't doing much themselves.
However, if they are hungry, they will smack chickens in an attempt to get meat from them. I will be spawning little meat chunks once chickens die. One chicken will feed many children so you shouldn't worry about needing a billion chickens dead. Most likely there will be bigger animals to take down. I also want to have an inventory system, but way more on that probably next month.
Hunger
Hunger prompted many new design choices such as "How do I display that your children are hungry?". I'm a big fan of NO HUD games but sometimes when you have so many NPCs on screen, it's just not possible to individually check each. So besides obvious animations I will have icons that hover over them and can be seen from anywhere. They are toggleable.
Next week I will add leash controls for the children so that they obey you and just follow you instead of running off going ham on chickens.
Stay tuned!