I have around 150 "zones" in the game world, 8000 x 6000 each, containing almost 12,000 ground objects each zone, ground objects would be grass, forest, dirt, water, snow, etc. After noticing my save and load times are getting really long and experiencing crashes while placing ground objects in the level editor is increasing, I'm afraid the size of my world might be just a bit too large, shrinking the game world may be necessary. I have found a few helpful tips online about reducing save and load times, one of those is using tiles instead of objects which could take a decent amount of time to replace but if it helps, I have to do it. I suppose this is all part of the learning process, like a lot of first time game developers I'm making the most common mistake, it's so easy to let your game grow like a weed, fertilized by ambition and vision. I have to remind myself that completing this game and keeping things reasonable is more important.
I still haven't started getting deep into the code just yet because I want most of the graphics to be finished so that when I start getting into the code I can devote 100% of my time and focus into it. I did however recently play a bit with the code so that I may start to see a bit of life when I run the game at least, so I started with my NPCs. Basically I have been trying to get the NPCs in the world to randomly wander about. As of now the NPCs wander pretty well, I had some challenges making sure that the animation sequence for the proper movement direction was being displayed. Early on the character would walk correctly in some directions and then start moonwalking, also as time passed they would wander off into the wilderness and I had to slow them down and make their travel distances a lot shorter with a higher chance of standing still over moving. The current issue I have now is to make sure that the NPC won't just walk through the walls and objects. This fisherman is the shop owner so he will need to stay in this store or at least within a distance of the shop, I will have to figure this out. To accompany these additional movements for the NPCs I have a lot of animations do make for all these directions and I might just start making a few animals that can roam the forest like deer, foxes and hares that will use this same code.
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JeffreyAn aspiring game developer, follow my journey from the beginning Archives
March 2019
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