Enemy pathfinding, collider hell and post jam updates
Hiya! TinyTaunters team here. We’d like to share our experience with LD56 and some news.
Building everything from scratch including audio and hand drawn artwork was super exciting and we loved all the feedback we got. Most of us are really inexperienced in game dev and have only joined a couple of jams and figuring stuff as you go bears its consequences.
We were thinking of doing a post-mortem for Tiny Taunters but… the game is simply not dead. It’s just getting patched… rather slowly due to all of us having to go back to our banal non-jam day-to-day.
Good news is we’ve got our first major UPDATES. So let’s talk about the major issues we encountered with the game and how we solved them.
Enemy Pathfinding
Our original pathfinding algorithm for the enemy AI was naive to say the least. We just calculated a vector towards the player, raycast and if there were obstacles in the way you stayed put, if not you went towards the position where you last saw the player.
This resulted in some very fun exploits where you could just stack enemies in corners and spam them with taunts
In order to fix it we moved to an A* solution. It was fairly easy to implement and with some fine tuning … the enemies were too smart. You could literally not get away from them even if they were slow as a turtle.
Also we had to abandon moving their transforms and try to use the physics engine through rigidbody which took some time to work into the scripts.
After some more tuning we found a decent balance of stupid vs fun. Now you can still sort of trick them but it is harder and kind of fun to try out.
Box collider hell
We also tried to do tile maps and sprite colliders for the first time. Our first plan was to put everything in tilemaps and then draw colliders on top of it. It turned out… fine. But when we started messing with the scales or positions of objects we had to manually move all colliders around and wall colliders were a mess.
A bigger problem surfaced when we added animations to the enemies. Since our art was all hand drawn, their sprites were all over the place leading to really messy interactions.
First approach towards a fix was a polygon collider. This fixed the problem with the animations but the generated colliders had a lot of edges and the enemies got stuck all over the place. This also applied to a lot of the objects.
Our second approach was adding simpler colliders on enemies and composing them into shapes with good round edges. Then we discovered that we could add tilemap colliders while making custom physics shapes for our tiles. Splash a composite collider on top and you have a minimal polygon that looks exactly as you designed it. We separated the tiles that had collisions with the tiles that were just the ground and we were good to go.
Tiny Taunters version 2! What’s next? We published a new version of our game yesterday. This includes major fixes such as: - A* pathfinding for enemies - Better colliders - New artwork - New animations - Various quality of life fixes - 🥳A public Leaderboard!🥳
We really liked the idea of having a leaderboard in order to interact with other players worldwide so we used https://danqzq.itch.io/leaderboard-creator to set it up.
We are thinking of doing some major reworks and adding some exciting new features. Namely, we are considering collectibles and alternative scoring system, different character powers and more beautiful artwork by metaksonio
