NcJump devlog #6

The time to add enemies to the game has finally come, and that translates to factories!

Factories

An enemy is just another kind of entity, which is the reason that pushed me towards implementing a class which sole responsibility is to create entities: the EntityFactory. This factory contains a list of entity prototypes which can be selected from the editor and placed into the scene. Under the hood, the prototype is cloned, the clone is moved at mouse position, and it is added to the list of entities of the scene.

At this point I realized that every clone was duplicating textures, which is something that could and should be avoided, so I introduced another factory: the GraphicsFactory. The responsibility of this class is to maintain a list of textures which can be referenced by multiple graphics components, as well as to create any kind of sprite which makes use of one of those textures.

Commands

Once I had enemies in the scene, I began wondering how to make them move. Reusing the state component of the main character sounded OK to me, but there was a problem. The movement logic within the state component was directly checking the gamepad and the keyboard, which meant that player’s input would move both the main character and all the enemies. Decoupling to the rescue.

Input → MoveCommand → StateComponent

I removed the dependency to the input from the state component, and I introduced the concept of commands. For simplicity, I will just focus on the MoveCommand. The state component now is just listening for move commands and, when they are issued, the component inspects the values in a move command and updates its state accordingly. Move commands, and possibly other kinds of commands, can be issued by any source: player input, in-game console, scripts, and so on.

Scripts

Other engines may use terms like behaviors, but I prefer to stick with the technical term: script. With this you can indeed model behaviors of entities, like a wandering behavior that I had in mind for my first class of enemies. Ideally it might also be written with a scripting language, like LUA which is supported by the nCine, but that is something I will maybe explore in the future.

I wrote down a couple of line for the wandering behavior which should just move the entity to the right or to the left until an obstacle is encountered, and then it should turn back and continue in a loop. The result is quite interesting, but I believe it can be further improved. Bye for now!