The Biggest Obstacles

While this game did turn out better than I had originally anticipated, it is far from a perfect game with a truly complete vision.

We had very lofty goals at the start, hoping to make up to three floors for this dungeon, each with increasing difficulty and a unique boss. We also wanted to completely randomize room layout so each run felt completely different. These turned out to be more than we could handle in the span of a couple months, so we scaled back and made it only one floor with semi-random rooms.

One of the hardest parts for me as a programmer was enemy pathing. I researched multiple theories and scripts that existed to simulate the pathing but not all of them could be implemented into GMS at that time. It was also tricky because we wanted pathing to be different for different enemies. For instance, the ghosts run to the player and can move through objects. The mummies and spiders path to the player but have to move around obstacles. The skeletons, zombies, and baby spiders walk randomly. 

By far the hardest to code was the mummy/spider pathing. It was simple enough to choose random directions to walk or to walk to a player and ignore obstacles, but this pathing was the hardest. It definitely was the part of coding this game that took the longest, as the implementation and debugging were not easy.

Despite all of this, I think going through this process undoubtedly made me a better coder and game designer. While it was stressful at the time and I did struggle at first, I am incredibly thankful for having the opportunity to learn about these things and help contribute a lot to the final product of the game.