Items Completed
Refactors and Planning
For the past few weeks I’ve been evaluating different strategies to improve the way state is managed. In particular, while the rules and actions feel very clean, testing sometimes is a bit problematic. Specifically, anytime using thunk style actions that called other thunk style actions, it was cumbersome to write the tests.
Entities
Entity management was the first main concern. The characters section is a bit clunky with how characters are created and added. Also, what components should characters have? What should the process be for adding or modifying skills? How should inventory management be coordinated? How to keep track of the position of characters, items, in relation to each other? Spawners were added to the “map” data store, do they belong there?
I researched implemented various Entity-Component-System patterns. I think this is the right foundation going forward, which is to split some of the state management from the rules management. The rules representing more of the system behaviors in an ECS. But one thing I like about the current model, is while actions are problematic to test at times, they provide great encapsulation between when/how state is updated and where logic is happening.
To start the refactor I’ve created a world rule area that provides an aggregate view of
all the entities in the game. This allows getting all entities that match certain component
requirements without concern about what type of entity they are. So, retrieving all the
entities that can be drawn can be simplified to a single selector.
In the long run, all entities will be stored and managed by the state, but for the initial refactor, just splitting out the selector and aggregating together is helping entity management.
Map Management
The big concern I’m working on now is how to organize map data more intelligently. This next milestone is heavily dependent on creating more sophisticated map data. In particular:
- Maps need to have doors
- Maps need to have ladders/portal to connect to other maps
- Maps need to have descriptions attached to rooms, or corridors
- Tiles should be able to have a variety of tiles to break up the monotony of the grid
This means we need to break apart some of the map data and simplify state management into a very basic storage mechanism and provide the right selectors, accessors into the data.
For example, I should be able to ask, what room am I in right now? I should also be able to get a list of tiles from x,y-w,h.
These refactors are slow right now because I’m not sold on a particular solution. I’m keeping my desire for easy to TDD the game and that is what is putting an additional constraint on finding an ideal pattern. Just doing it in a fairly clean approach wouldn’t be much concern, but how to do it in a way that is easy to test??