This is already the fifth blog post about this project! It’s probably the longest I’ve dedicated to a single project. In this entry, I’ve focused on extensive refactoring, tackling code smells, and laying down the groundwork for what will eventually become the pathfinding system.

Additionally, I managed to enable Mermaid diagrams rendering in my hugo theme. As we say in French, une image vaut mille mots (a picture is worth a thousand words), so I hope the diagrams will help illustrate the changes I’ve made to the project.

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1. Migration: Bevy v0.12.1 to v0.13.1
2. Mechanics/System: Multiple maps
   1. Adding an exit tile
   2. Generating the exit position
   3. Despawning entities on map exit
   4. Showing the map number
3. Miscellaneous
4. Final result
5. Closing thoughts

You can still read the previous devlog if you missed it.

Migration: Bevy v0.12.1 to v0.13.1

As I mentioned in the previous post, Bevy upgraded to v0.13 with a lot of new features (and breaking changes). Since then, the v0.13.1 was released with its various fixes and several guides updated their documentation accordingly.

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If you’ve read the devlog entry that I released in January, you might have observed a change in the website’s appearance since then. Indeed, earlier the site images had a persistent shimmer, which appeared to be a recurring issue with Jekyll’s Chirpy. While there might be a simple fix that I might have missed, I opted to switch to a complete different theme in the end!

The current website is now generated using hugo, a really fast and lightweight framework for building static website. Migrating the blog posts and pages was a swift process, given the limited amount of content I’ve written so far. If you still see the old theme on other pages, clear the cache for this website in your web browser.

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Welcome to the first official devlog post! You can still read the previous devlog entry to understand the project and the idea behind. In this entry, I’ll mainly share some map improvements I’ve been working on.

1. Bug Fixing: Player spawning on a non-walkable tile
2. Bug Fixing: Pixel artifacts between the tiles
3. Mechanics/Systems: Generating the map
   1. With a Cellular Automaton
   2. With Perlin Noise
4. Debugging: Display tile coordinates
5. Content: Meet Mr. Rabbit
6. Final result
7. Closing Thoughts

Bug Fixing: Player spawning on a non-walkable tile

Originally, the player had a hardcoded spawn point at (0,0) regardless of the tile. But, since the stones are randomly generated on the map, it can lead to situations where the player spawns on a non-walkable tile.

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Introduction

Over the last two months, I’ve been hooked on Tales of Maj’Eyal, playing it almost on a daily basis. Developed in 2012, its gameplay and engine derive directly from classical roguelikes, particularly Angband which is itself based on Moria.

The game is quite straightforward – you guide a top-down character through a 2D world. Navigating randomly generated levels, your goal is to defeat the final boss. Despite its apparent simplicity, its richness lies in the sheer number of playable classes and races, its difficulty modes and its various campaigns (some DLCs, arena mode, infinite dungeon mode, etc).

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Halloween Night Sky over the French Countryside

While Halloween never reached the same level of popularity in France as Christmas, I’ve always had a preference for the former over the latter. In the past, we would decorate our countryside home with glowing, carved pumpkins, creating a truly unique nighttime landscape.

A typical carved pumpkin we used to make

Although my childhood and the house I grew up in are now distant memories, the emotions and the ambiance of Halloween continue to resonate in me as the holiday comes every year.

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