The time has come. For another devlog.

For the past two weeks I have been working on giving the NPCs proper pathfinding. Its been harder than I anticipated. I have implemented this type of navigation before, but I ran into all sorts of problems this time around. I tried 3 different ways of navigating. One using the existing tile map as the nav mesh? I guess you call it. another I tried was using just a big polygon as the mesh and have the NPCs avoid obstacles using different code, and I tried making a new tile map using square tiles to see if they would behave the way I wanted. None of these worked as well as having the NPCs just be able to move everywhere. I will take another stab at pathfinding in the future, but for now the NPCs don't follow the tile map, but I did update the movement code so they are smarter than before.

Before starting in on the whole pathfinding debacle, I was working on adding items you collect from the NPC's houses. I'm still not 100 percent on how its going to work. The idea is that your an alien using human technology to repair your damaged mothership. So I was thinking the items you collect would be household items you combine to repair the navigation system on the mothership. Really it would be just 3 unique items you would have to search the houses for. Once you collect them all you combine them to make another item to repair the mothership. This sounds complicated, but I want to have story reasons on why your going into the peoples houses, and I think other ideas could come from it. So I made a small inventory box that pops up next to the alien character, and drew a couple items that randomly get assigned to houses. Its not fully implemented but I'm liking how it looks so far. 

Game mechanics and design are definitely the hardest thing for me so far. I even bought a couple books on puzzle design and read through the parts that would apply to game design, but it mostly gave me ideas for board games. Not real time problem solving type things like I want this game to be. Anyway I have a lot more to learn and that's the whole point of making this game. 

I'm never sure on how much detail I should go into when making these logs, but I try to not get to technical just incase someone actually reads this. These are mostly for my own reverence anyway. I think documenting even my failures will be good to look back at and see what I was thinking.