pixelpaton

Well it’s been a while, but with good reason. My wife and I packed up our lives and moved house away from our country living and back to the suburbs. I’ve now gotten a full time job, moving away from full-time indie game development, and we have a baby Paton on the way in about 3 months. So without internet, and time, the development of this game had to slow down immensely. But I’m getting back up to speed again and I’ve made quite a lot of changes to the game since my last video update.

I’m getting pretty close to a good solid game engine now, with just one majar thing to work out, then LOTS of small things to tweak and adjust. The graphics are still very much placeholder, I’m not really sure how the final game will look at this stage, but I like to keep polishing things as it gives a more realistic setup for when real graphics are finally used.

Due to the game play needing more flexibility I switch over from using the built in pathfinding solution in Unity (Pro version) to using an A* method. I ended up buying the excellent ‘Simply A*’ from the asset store and worked with the plugin developer to tweak things a little. The developer was great help and for $20 this plugin saved me a lot of time and hassle. As I had already set my game up with a completely different method of pathfinding it did take quite a bit of effort to adapt my game to an alternative method, but it’s all working well now. The biggest change brought about by using A* is that levels are now more dynamic and pathways can be created by the player, rather than being baked and unchangeable.

Here’s a couple of videos where I talk about the pathfinding …

Pathfinding demo 1.mov from Terry Paton on Vimeo.

Pathfinding demo 2 from Terry Paton on Vimeo.

Check it out ‘Simply A*’ here: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/#/content/6385

There’s still quite a bit of work to go, but it is progressing. Can’t wait till I start getting new graphics into the game!