Dammit, the knock the enemies down code finally works. I found that it wasn’t the falling function per se, it was all the rest of the bloody things. Basically, if you make an enemy airborne all the cute little things that the AI controls, like turning around at walls and the ends of platforms will trigger. So, it’ll think to itself,
“Duh, there is no platform in front of me *drool*. I should walk the other way. What was I doing again?”
The problem is that, when it turns around, it changes the state of the enemy, which then triggered the regular falling down code. In other words, it would knock the little buggers a few feet into the air, and then, like David Bowie, they would fall to Earth. So I went ahead and made the system only do all of that if the enemy wasn’t in the process of flying through the air with the greatest of ease. So now, when you hit an enemy 3 times they get knocked back, pop up and arc gracefully through the air until coming to rest on the ground again. I’m going to need to go in and make a few changes to the code so they bounce appropriately. I’m thinking that, since enemies don’t have a wall clinging state like The Thief, they will simply change direction if they hit a wall while airborne.
Speaking of The Thief, once the Throw system is installed, I’m thinking that I’ll make a small tweak to his Wall Hanging code, so when he is thrown into a wall, he’ll stick for a moment before falling off into the Doomed state. OR I’ll make him do the same thing that the enemies do for consistency. It should be pretty easy to install, but there’s a lot of other things that need doing first.
Anyhow, I was thinking recently, looking back on the project and the List, that this time I may have bitten off more than I can easily chew. But I don’t think that’s such a bad thing. If you only ever do what you know you can do, then you’ll never do anything.
In other words, I’m of the mind that for everything you do, pick something that you think is just beyond your abilities, so they have room to grow. I mean, I’ve been working for a year and a half at this point and that List => still needs doing. But you know, now I know I can do this. I didn’t when I started, because I thought this whole thing was just past what I could do. Actually, it turned out to be far more than what I thought I could do, but I’ve managed anyway. I’m glad I was stupid in my ambitions. The next thing, I have almost no idea how I’m even going to try doing that, so that’s status quo really here at Star Frog.
-Speaking of which, Star Frog Games (or the Star Frog Project – depending on who asks and what my mood happens to be) as a name was originally a nonsense word set that I could find on the Google machine. Then I got to thinking about it, especially in the context of the previous paragraph. I mean, you don’t send frogs into space. They have no real way of getting there themselves, it’s outside of what it possible. Yet, the logo, such as it is, shows a frog wearing a space helmet. In other words, doing the impossible – just like us. Of course, I’ve arrived at this far after naming the group, but now I can’t think of a better name.