State Machines

With this project I wanted to try out a few thoughts I had concerning player characters and their interaction with the world as well as how NPCs interact with the player character all within the context of a 2D Metroidvania style game.

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Going into this I knew that I wanted a way for enemies to react to the player differently depending on what the player may be doing at any given moment.  So in order to do that, I had to make sure the system knew exactly what the player was doing at any given moment.  To do this I set up a finite state machine to keep track of the player's movements.  I then used this information to drive the character's animations.  With that working I was fairly certain that other elements, like enemy NPCs could pull that same data and use it in their AI algorithms.

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The other part of this experiment involved interactions with the world.  Specifically causing changes to the terrain by either adding or removing some of it.  This led me to Unity's tilemap system which can do it surprisingly easily, even in real time.