Mines, Giant Asteroids, and Story

There has been a lot of progress recently but not a lot of big exciting things to show off, apart from maybe the mines. Mostly I've been working on story and levels to build out a single run of the game to the length I want. I think this has also been the longest break in dev logs, which shows I've either run out of interesting things to talk about, or I've been way too stuck in the details of everything and now need to come up for air.

Mines!

As part of adding some more chaos and danger to the levels I worked on some exploding mines. They're quite simple, in that generally they will explode if you get too close, but combining that with physics and the ability to hide them makes for some fun and unpredictable scenarios. There's a story reason for these mines being here while pilots are engaged in peaceful mining activities, but I'll talk about that a little bit more below.

There's a Seeker mine, which will roam around the level looking for a target, and once it finds one will follow it until close enough, and then explode! This uses the same pathfinding as the Drones, though I had to update it to be able to deal with pathfinding to a constantly moving target. I also got to test out the pathfinding's parameterisation of minimum path widths, since I wanted the Seekers to move quite close to things and not take a longer and safer path. Here's a gif of one creeping up on the player:

There's a very simple "touch" mine, which has four pressure points on it which when touched will detonate the mine. Pretty standard but also useful to the clever miner who can have them explode where they want. I actually ended up updating some core entity code for these guys since I wanted to be able to embed them within asteroids and have their pressure points work perfectly.

The third type is the Jumper, which are definitely my favourite (maybe for obvious reasons). They're embedded within asteroids, sometimes visibly and sometimes not, and jump out of the surface to explode as close as possible to a target. If you're fast enough you might even be able to catch one...

Giant Asteroids

I'll quickly mention some giant asteroids that I've been adding in preparation for some more "diggy" tools I'm thinking to add. When adding these I had to update some of the game's screen wrapping code to handle entities that could be off both the top and bottom of the screen at the same time, which had just never happened before. I also found out that the wrapping code happily handles giant entities colliding with themselves!

(Giant banana is for illustration purposes only. I can't guarantee that there'll be a giant banana in the game.)

Story

Much of the work I've been doing recently is on writing the story and events that take place, and then building out the rest of the levels for a full playthrough. I didn't start this project with the goal of writing a cool story, but I knew I needed some form of story in order to give the game structure. To that end, I wanted the story to be simple and coherent, give an actual reason for the events and scenario of the game, and then not get in the way of people just playing the game. I've heard a few people actually describe the writing as good, which is not