AI Ships Active - 2/17 to 2/23 - My Week In GameDev

This week I switched tasks from baseline systems to focusing on interconnecting systems. Systems that allow the player to interact with the world.

One quality of life update was to make it easier to hunt targets that have gone off screen. Now the crosshair will stick to the edge of the screen letting you know which direction to fly without having to zoom all the way out.

Here is what took the bulk of my time, a context menu that generates a list of possible actions you can take given the relationship between yours ship and the other ship as well as other field factors. I ended up creating a new type of UI menu system for this as the built in ones such as scrollview just didn't give the exact results I wanted. Now it's feeling slick and works perfectly.Took some time but it's a pretty core system to the game.

Next up was working on the AI Ship controller, which like the player controller can possess a ship and give it directions. The AI now knows how to pick effective targets and fly their ship in such a way to catch their target.

In the coming week I will be working on UI updates including alerts, com chatter, and a menu that save/load/settings can be placed in.