{"id":59,"date":"2008-01-31T00:23:30","date_gmt":"2008-01-30T13:23:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.vectorstorm.org\/2008\/01\/31\/reflections-on-munchers-labyrinth\/"},"modified":"2008-01-31T10:21:27","modified_gmt":"2008-01-30T23:21:27","slug":"reflections-on-munchers-labyrinth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/2008\/01\/31\/reflections-on-munchers-labyrinth\/","title":{"rendered":"Reflections on Muncher&#8217;s Labyrinth"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>So I&#8217;m generally pleased with how Muncher&#8217;s Labyrinth turned out, especially bearing in mind how little time I had to put it together.<\/p>\n<p>Since the original release on Sunday night, I&#8217;ve made a few more minor modifications.Most notably, there have been a few crash fixes, and in 1.0.3 I improved the Meat AI so that they behave a little more sensibly when there is more Meat than Shinies in the maze.  (You can grab the 1.0.3 build over on the Muncher&#8217;s Labyrinth &#8220;Get Games&#8221; link in the sidebar)<\/p>\n<p>But most of my time since Sunday has been going into trying to come up with a reliable and useful build system under Windows.  As it turns out, making a build using Visual Studio Express gets me into the whole dynamic runtime &#8220;DLL Hell&#8221;problem, where many people don&#8217;t have the required versions of the redistributable runtime dlls already installed, and I can&#8217;t simply include the dlls in the application folder due to Microsoft&#8217;s SxS runtime system.  And I&#8217;d really rather avoid having to learn how to put together an installer.<\/p>\n<p>I have a MinGW build of Muncher&#8217;s being tested right now, and if that works, then I&#8217;ll probably move to that, since it relies on a runtime dll that&#8217;s been shipped with Windows since 95, so that&#8217;s probably a lot more safe to assume will be present.  (But honestly, I still far prefer the Visual Studio IDE)<\/p>\n<p>I expect that I&#8217;ll return to Muncher&#8217;s again sometime in the future.  I have a bunch of ideas for improvements to it, which will be fun to try out when I&#8217;m not under a big deadline.  Most notably:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Get rid of the minimap, and instead use on-screen direction indicators to entrances<\/li>\n<li>Level progression (ie: survive with a certain number of shinies, and advance to the next level)<\/li>\n<li>I want a seamless transition from the title screen into the game;  use the same maze in the title screen as in game, so we can just zoom in on it to see the action.<\/li>\n<li>Better adaptive difficulty levels.<\/li>\n<li>Improve the generation of &#8220;broken wall&#8221; particles so that the wall actually appears to shatter as you hit it.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So plenty of things to do.  But I&#8217;m going to leave it for the moment, and come back in a few weeks or months, so I can see it with fresh eyes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So I&#8217;m generally pleased with how Muncher&#8217;s Labyrinth turned out, especially bearing in mind how little time I had to put it together. Since the original release on Sunday night, I&#8217;ve made a few more minor modifications.Most notably, there have been a few crash fixes, and in 1.0.3 I improved the Meat AI so that&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/po9WK-X","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=59"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=59"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vectorstorm.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=59"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}