During the compo, I ran into a bug that made two pushable box (which should collide and stop) run over each other.  I’ve been trying to fix that, but now nothing makes sense anymore… The gif bellow can better show it (and also show a new stage! ).

As you can see, the first time it collides perfectly… but the second time (which should be the exact same situation), they overlap each other… One thing that I was able to notice (after dumping some frame-by-frame information to a .txt file… >_<)  is that there may be a relation with their order in the object list (FlxGroup, if you’ve ever used Flixel).

Ok, this gave me a (stupid) idea. I’ll check which is the left most one and pass that as the second object to the collision method (FlxObject.separate). I’ll post soon with results. Obviously, it didn’t work. ¬¬

So, I’ve spend almost 6 hours today trying to get the pathfinding working for my PACMAN game, fighting lots of strange code bugs (and one eclipse bug). Then, when I get everything right, I realize that the way I was approaching the problem was fundamentally wrong!

See, I was picking one of the closest pellets, and trying to find a path around the monsters to it. If there was a monster between Pac and the pellet, this algorithm won’t find another closer pellet in the other direction!

In short, whenever pacman sees a monster between him and the pellet he wants, he freezes.

The solution is to instead implement a BFS, returning when I find the first pellet available (should have seen that all along ). But since I’ve spent SO much time tweaking the AI already, I will put this on the backburner, and work a bit on the sound effects (Wakka wakka wakka!), and the graphics. After I’m done with a somewhat more polished look to my game, I will concentrate on the AI again.

Here are the links, if you want to play with dumb pacman:

• Java Applet
• Fat Jar

Lunch 1
It’s almost 3 pm here in Arlington, VA and I’m having my first lunch for LD23. Kind of late but I wait until I’m hungry.

Chicken and Vegetable stir-fry.

Progress

It’s coming a long, but I’m feeling the pressure. My task list seems too long. Worst part is I’ve hit a bug! Maybe you can help? My FlashPunk Entity is not calling the Update method! I’ve triple checked and the World Update is being called and calling the supper.Update()!

package SeedsOfDestruction
{
import com.greensock.easing.Cubic;
import com.greensock.easing.Quad;
import com.greensock.TweenMax;
import flash.display.BitmapData;
import net.flashpunk.Entity;
import net.flashpunk.FP;
import net.flashpunk.graphics.Image;

public class SeedBullet extends Entity
{
[Embed(source = "/assets/Seed Bullet.png")] public static const SEED_BULLET:Class;

public static const SPEED:Number = 200;

public var image:Image;

public function SeedBullet(player:Player)
{
// Make the Pink transparent
var bitmapData:BitmapData = Global.MakeTransparent(SEED_BULLET);
image = new Image(bitmapData);

super(x, y, image);

FP.angleXY(this, player.stem.angle, 40, player.x, player.y);
image.angle = player.stem.angle;
image.centerOrigin();
image.smooth = true;
active = false;
layer = 2;

setHitbox(40, 40);
type = “seedbullet”;

trace(“created”);
}

override public function update():void
{
trace(“update”);
super.update();

trace(“update2″);
if (collide(“BadPlant”, x, y))
{
explode();
}
}

override public function added():void
{
super.added();

var time:Number = FP.distance(x, y, world.mouseX, world.mouseY) / SPEED;
TweenMax.to(this, time, { x:world.mouseX, y:world.mouseY, ease:Quad.easeOut, onComplete:explode } );
}

public function explode():void
{
world.add(new Explode(this));
world.remove(this);
}
}
}

Sadly there was a tiny bug in the final version of my game – the line “state = STATE_LEVEL;” was missing, so no pause screen would be shown between levels (although the code for layout and mechanics of that screen was already in there, as can be seen in the source).

I have fixed this and uploaded a new version to my site as both zip and webstart:

• Webstart
• ZIP file

Sorry about that!

Battled with a stupid bug for maybe an hour. Turned out I had written an asymmetrical comparison operator which crashed sort. I’m not so great at debuggin D yet, at first I didn’t get the debug info, and when I finally did and found a debugger, it wasn’t so helpful. Funnily enough, I ended up solving it with traditional writefln debugging instead, which just took a couple of minutes. Hmm..

Anyway, what I had done before the bug was adding attack towers, which charge up blobs of darkness and fire them at the butterflies.

It mostly just looks like chaos, becuse I just randomly place everything.

Yes. See how far I’ve come. You all don’t stand a chance. Maybe, before time is up, I’ll even manage to make my sprites flip without glitching out in oldfashioned tilemapped glory… but who really wants that anyway? Tilemapped glitches are the best.