7DRL 2018: Day 3

I ended up pushing through and keeping the Chipmunk physics engine in place. I'm glad I did. Once I'd managed to get back to where I had been in terms of the movement feel I was able to quickly get the sword contact working, which would have been quite a bit more work to do myself.

It took a couple of tries to figure out the best way to handle movement. The Chipmunk forums suggest tying the main physics body to a kinematic body via constraints, and then setting target velocities on the kinematic body. I found it was much easier to just use forces and torques. The things I'm doing aren't stiff enough to require anything more complicated. I ended up sub-stepping the physics sim anyway, to enable better sword collisions. It's running at 240 Hz right now. We'll see whether that holds up as I add more people.

I'm still behind where I wanted to be. It's not technically a game yet because you can't fail. It's starting to be a bit of a fun toy, though.

Tomorrow I'm going to turn this into a real game. The enemies will try to fight back. There will be more than one, which means I have to revisit the player control scheme. Right now the player character orients toward the closest enemy. Pressing the button swings the sword between forehand and backhand stances, but with the re-orientation to face new enemies that can do some weird things. It also doesn't really say what to do when there are no enemies around.