Friends!

I had the idea last night that a companion animal might be a fun mechanic in the game, opening up some new types of encounters and making recurring puzzles easier the second time around. I don’t have a #1 favourite animal but Opossums are def in the top 10. They’re funny looking creatures that do good work in nature - eating ticks and cleaning up after larger carnivores. So now the player character has a companion opossum who joins the PC and helps out by fetching crates. Sorta cute.

I also did a little work on the transitions, cleaning them up and adding an entry animation.

Later: optimising the possum pickup path is something I could spend a couple days on. But I have like a week and a bit left for this project so I won’t:

The possum enters the level and starts grabbing pickups for the player. The logical method (assuming a logical possum) is to grab the closest pickup, then the pickup closest to that one, and so on - a greedy possum algorithm. Implementing this in the game loop was interesting to me - the closest pickup can change as the possum travels along the trajectory between one pickup and the next one.

In sparse-pickup levels, this works really cool and looks sorta organic, you can imagine the possum thinking “this one, then that one, ohh nah, then THAT one..”

In more dense pickup fields, this approach resulted in some crazy oscillations. The possum may be following a trajectory that would intercept with a middle-distance between two locations. At this ‘Lagrangian Pickup Point’ the possum is struck with indecision - which is the closest? that one, no this one, no that one… Greedy Algo in the loop without any persistent memory of a plant doesn’t work out in this application. I tried adding jitter, cause I really wanted the organic / chaotic possum energy, but even with jitter I found oscillations could still occur.

So, I took the boring route. The possum moves through level pickups in a predetermined order, optimisation of the pickup order based on the possum spawn point is done on level load.

One weird annoyance I will figure out tomorrow - while the possum extends the enemy class and uses the same motion->animation mapping, it can sometimes moonwalk to a target location. another //TODO