Design Tile based gameplay

[Leanthor]

I'm a total amateur and for my first large project I've been working on a tactics style turn based strategy game.

I'm kind of at a loss on how to handle tiles, I prototyped drawing rays from the character to change the instance of tile objects to movable tiles for movement, but I don't think that's going to work when I start to include enemies and tile modifiers. Any ideas on how to pseudocode this? Is there some sort of approach to tile based game construction that I'm not realizing?

 

[JackTurbo]

How are you handling your grid generation?

 

[Leanthor]

How are you handling your grid generation?

Currently I'm manually creating instances of each space in the grid as an object at room generation.

 

[JackTurbo]

Raycasting isn't gonna be the most reliable way of doing things on a grid in my experience.

Have you decided on how you're pathfinding yet? - this will likely dictate how you handle a lot of other movement related things.

 

[Leanthor]

Raycasting isn't gonna be the most reliable way of doing things on a grid in my experience.

Have you decided on how you're pathfinding yet? - this will likely dictate how you handle a lot of other movement related things.

A suggestion from another person I was talking with is to iterate through every tile adjacent to the unit and assign a cost based on weights. Then do the same for tiles just checked, adding the previous cost. If a tile can be reached from 2 tiles, pick the one with the lower cost. Before iterating, walls and enemy units are removed from the available tiles.

 

[JackTurbo]

I'd suggest taking a look at Sgt Indie's tutorial series. Its really good and explains a whole bunch in depth. He uses an object based grid, that I would caution does have a big performance overhead. It should be worth a watch though to see how he tackles these issues.

His A* implementation is pretty similar to the approach you mentioned.

 

[Leanthor]

I'd suggest taking a look at Sgt Indie's tutorial series. Its really good and explains a whole bunch in depth. He uses an object based grid, that I would caution does have a big performance overhead. It should be worth a watch though to see how he tackles these issues.

His A* implementation is pretty similar to the approach you mentioned.

Wow, this is exactly the kind of example I've been looking for, thank you so much!

 

[Yal]

This is probably covered in that example, but I'd say the idea is to have a ds_queue (a FIFO data structure) and a list of visited cells. For every neighboring non-visited cell, pass on the current movement 'currency' and put it in the queue and the visited list. Until the queue is empty: get the cell. Mark it as an OK movement cell if it's not obstructed. For every neighboring cell to this cell, if it's not visited and the movement cost < movement currency, put it in the queue and in the visited list with currency-moveCost currency. Repeat until the queue is empty.

I've got some pointers for ideas to handle enemy AI if you're interested (I made a tactics game for a summer-long jam a few years ago), there were a whole bunch of things to consider and I ended up having to cut some corners to get the AI turns to not freeze the computer for several seconds