Originally, we were planning on not having a character for the player to control. This meant that the player would have been focusing purely on a management-style game and spending too much time within the user-interface with more or less a static layout, and this gives the vibe of a "watching paint dry" or a "watch these plants grow in real-time" type of entertainment.
Basic movement with shapes
Temporarily creating a placeholder and temporarily applying movement through keyboard input is simple enough for testing. Pushing ahead, instead of relying on sprite frame changes with keyboard input, the character position change on the cartesian plane is actually what is implemented as it is flexible with other non-player actions!
Applying sprites and animation frames
Applying Erika's character sprites brings more life than placeholders. The sprite animations along with movement of the sprite and the camera when applied gives us a look at what characters look like when moving.
Lookin' good! Of course, different flavours of movements and animations, as well as other actions besides simply walking exist. Setting up the red carpet for task-based animations and movement is simply a given. While the sprites for diagonal movement do exist, it's currently a toss up between simple snappy movements or not.
Character Collision Handling
There are additional functionalities to consider for movement besides ... moving. Not all moving objects will be ghosts phasing through other objects!
So of course character-object collisions are added for the character! This type of collision is similar to object-object collisions mentioned in the previous post Click and Drag Again.
Brainstorming Notes
Character interaction walking around furniture
- Collision handling when passing by multiple objects
- Phasing allowed through objects
- Character and object z-index consideration when moving in the y-axis
In-between walking animation consideration
- Diagonal direction or not
- Instant movement or turning animation prior to moving in a direction
Character collision and phasing through objects
- Avoiding use of /unstuck