Path Editor

Posted by James on May 7, 2010 under Tasty Planet | 11 Comments to Read

Often times I want the creatures in Tasty Planet to follow a path. For example, if I wanted a car to follow a road, in the correct lane, and then make a few turns along the road, I could define a path for it to follow. I added a path creation feature to the level editor a few weeks ago to help me quickly define paths.

The art here is all old, but you can see a few test paths that I have created. The curve will go through the red points and be guided by the blue points (so I can sharp turns or smooth turns). If you’ve ever used an illustration or drawing program, it is similar to that. In Tasty Planet 1 I didn’t have a path editor, so I had to define the paths by manually entering coordinates into an XML file… not fun, and virtually impossible to do anything other than straight paths with occasional turns.

On a side note, the little ants that you might be able to make out in the screen shot are actually highly explosive… You see, I was implementing an explosion feature and I didn’t have any levels with objects that are actually supposed to be explosive, so I made the ants explode on contact with anything they touch… Not for the final game, but highly entertaining.