Slightly nostalgic about release notes being exciting, and something you worked towards with the team. Every few weeks you’d sit down and write about what you built.

I figure CI systems with build trains were probably the nail in the coffin for that practice 😬 #iosdev

NPCs now optionally have wander ranges! I got a bit tired of seeing them so static in the world, but this was also me procrastinating on implementing a dialogue system 😅

#gamedev #unity #golang

Interaction now moves the player close to the "Interactable" (NPCs in this case), rather than attempting to path to their exact location (and failing to do so 😅).

NPC information is now also fully driven by the backend. Next up is making these interactions actually do something ;) #gamedev #golang

One early decision that's starting to pay off in the backend design is this state provider pattern that I'm using. It's making it easy to introduce new state that requires communication to the client. It should also prove relatively simple to introduce player-scoped state (e.g. Quest NPCs) #golang

Finished the integration of NPCs on the backend. Their info & position now comes from a network packet. Next up is giving them an instance of their own class on the backend, which will take control of their AI (if they're not stationary) and handle dialog options/quest progression. #gamedev #unity

I'm currently working on the tooling to create/configure NPCs through Unity, and then export the information for use on the server. So I'm using Unity as a sort of "content management system" for the game, but ultimately the server will remain in control of whether NPCs are shown. #gamedev #golang

Step 1: The new packet type can be handled by the server and results in movement updates being sent to the client.

Now on to step 2: Handling the interaction type that was selected. They will each trigger different flows on the backend.

The first one I will try to implement is talking to an NPC.

Meet Herbert! He's just a capsule now, but he has some interaction options that might prove useful in the future 😉

The next step here is to make this networked: introducing the packets to facilitate interaction. I'll start by moving the player character in-range of the object/NPC. #gamedev #unity

Tomorrow it's time to lay the foundation for this task: NPCs 🤖

The first goal is to add NPCs that you can interact with through dialog, as that will be the first step towards building a narrative in the game. Exiciting! 🎉 #gamedev #golang

I got a little bit tired of the clunky character controller and the debug texture, so I spent some time playing around with camera movement and terrain painting. #gamedev #unity

Now back to actual game mechanics :)

Navigation now considers 3 nodes ahead in case the movement "budget" wasn't fully consumed. It still struggles with some tight corners that have a lot of polys in the mesh, but I'm going to cross that bridge when I (more frequently) get there.

Fun bug: movement on tight corners stutters because the next point is closer to the character than its movement speed per tick.

I'll try to fix this by having a movement budget that is consumed while moving, so navigation can traverse multiple nodes if they're close together. #golang #gamedev

So far I'm pleasantly surprised at how well the Navmesh on the server works! Here you can see it handle navigation in "structures". This is something I wanted to solve because ideally I'd like to be able to use verticality in the design of some dungeons. #gamedev #unity #golang

So happy to finally see this in action: here's a #golang backend moving characters along a NavMesh and streaming position data to the clients 😅 #gamedev

Rounding error in pathfinding causing it to never mark the path node as completed 🙈 #gamedev #unity #golang