The code for Beta is getting to a point of significant enough complexity that I’m having trouble keeping everything organized.
The problem over the last day or two has been that I keep testing out different art styles and types of animation. A few of the mobs I’ve created–Mowl is a good example–have what I would consider to be “over the top” sets of animations, all broken down into simple reactions that are (for the most part) selected in response to inputs or as random idle animations.
On the world map, Mowl will sometimes dig a hole and crawl around underground, leaving a dirt trail like Bugs Bunny taking a left at Albuquerque.
There’s also a set of rules for mobs that they will randomly get interested in items that are near them–if a mob “sees” a treasure chest, it goes, “Hey, what’s that?” and sort of moseys over to investigate.
Sometimes these systems, macro systems (that affect every mob) and micro systems (that affect one mob or a subset of mobs), can conflict in ways that make you go, “Oh, I forgot he did that.”
(Does Mowl ever dig his way over to treasure chests? What happens when he gets there and an idle animation is called while he’s “underground?”)
So, I’m running a bunch more tests.
Like, way more tests than are probably necessary at this point.
And there are bugs. Bits of code that aren’t being used. Mobs affected by layout changes. All the usual “cleanup” issues you run into.
I’m going through cleaning things up now.
Although, I’m wary of big, sweeping changes that Claude may want to implement. For example, this proposed change:
It sounds fine on the surface, but there’s no telling how this “polygon helper” will be impacted by future animation ideas I try out.