7 Day Roguelike 2017: Consumables
I added many features today, most notably consumable items that can be used while stationary in the field to repair the engine or replace a burst tyre. These items can be bought from the shop in the survivor camp. The shop also sells repairs that happen immediately.
Zombies are now dumber, and the game can handle many more of them. The game had noticeable delays between turns when there were more than 30 enemies on a map. Profiling revealed most of the time being spent in the zombie pathfinding code. Each zombie was performing a search to find the shortest path to the player. This was wasteful, and could be made much faster using dijkstra maps, where a map describing the shortest path from each cell to the player is computed once, and used by all NPCs. In the interest of time however, I made the zombies simply walk to wards the player if they know where the player is. This means zombies will now bump into obstacles as they move towards the player, which is appropriate behaviour for zombies. The game can now handle hundreds of zombies with no noticeable slowdown.
Various other minor changes:
- The contents of the shop is now randomized each time you enter the survivor camp.
- The chance to encounter the more difficult enemies (cars and bikes) goes up as the game progresses.
- The current amount of money owned by the player appears on the hud.
- The hud is now visible in menus in the survivor camp.
- I added flavour text to the camp explaining that the player is healed and paid when entering the camp. This should also help establish the game’s (minimal) story.
- The message log is now cleared between delivery runs.
- Driving into barrels causes them to explode.