The last week I have gone through the code, implementing and bug fixing the last things that needs to be done before we are ready for our beta presentation.
So, what needed to be done the last week? Well, a lot of things. The weeks between alpha and beta we have been working hard on getting things done. Pathfinding, furnitures, collision with things, guards AI, etc.
We had a play testing session the last Monday, and early Sunday we did not have a working game… Most things were not implemented. We did not have working furniture’s, guard pathfinding, lose or win condition, sound or music, doors, the right level (we still had the alpha map).
So, because I knew I would not have the time to make all of those things work, I had to prioritize what to do first.
I started out working on the guards AI, they did not behave as I wanted them to. They were seeing and walking through walls, some times. Some of them are standing in front, or even inside walls (see picture), I think that there is something wrong with their spawn positions and/or their waypoints for patrol.
I fixed most of the problems, but some rather huge are still there. They are kind of hard to pinpoint because they happen so rarely.
I really dislike pathfinding at the moment. I could not find out what was wrong with my A star code, it did not prioritize nodes closer to the goal, but expanded equally in all directions. This made the pathfinding very inefficient and the game was lagging really badly during the play testing. But yesterday, when I sat with it, I realized that I had made the cost to move between squares 10, but the distance to the goal only weigh 1 for each square. After I had fixed this small miss step the code is about infinitely faster if it has to find a path to a target somewhat far away. Before it could freeze for a couple of seconds, but now, it is not even noticeable. I am so happy about that.
Monday morning I was hoping for some help with implanting the furniture’s, doors and those things that were ready for implementation. But because I had not worked with the manager’s for those, it till most of the morning. I got, kind of, done about 10 minutes before the play testing, but they had no collision detection yet. That part I did not have time for.
The problem with the sound and music was that I had moved them from their original folder to another, but forgot to change the path. So that was fixed really fast. I am glad that we didn’t get the footstep sound to work before the play test, because they are REALLY annoying to listen to. It sounded a bit like sitting and hitting two coconuts against each other. So, either we have to find another sound, or just scrap the idea of hearing the characters footsteps while running.
Tomorrow is Beta presentation, and I think I got everything that is essential for it done.
Spörk 
Hello Andrée!
As you say in the title, this post is not really about an artifact. I know, writing about one artifact is difficult when you have been working on several artifacts and been fixing problems in the game. Try thinking back to artifacts that you have been working on during the previous weeks, and maybe then you will find something that you have not written a blog post about.
You could explain which of the guards’ problems you fixed and how you fixed them, instead of simply stating the problems and then tell us that some are fixed and others are still there.
I am not very familiar with A*, and so I did not understand your explanation of the problem of the guards’ pathfinding. However, I asked a classmate about it and then I understood the explanation you gave. The problem was that I found the structure of the sentence confusing, and I had maybe understood it if you had put it in another way.
Lastly, you write about having a sound of footsteps playing when the player is running. In my opinion, it would be weird to only hear the footsteps when the player is running and not hear any footsteps when the player is walking. Of course, the sounds of the footsteps would differ in speed and maybe volume.
Good luck and keep up the good work!
Nicolina