A MORE BREAD FOCUSED CHOMP + LEVEL 4 UPDATE

CONTEXT

This update focuses on two big issues.

The first one is in regards to Chomp's AI. As always, I have been monitoring Chomp's behaviour, how players use him to get what they want and how they are using the lolly packets. If they are using the lolly packets and why they use them. If they wait and why the wait. I believe there is still an issue that annoys players more than makes the game fun for them and that is Chomp's behaviour. It is still completely random and this can be good and bad, of course, but at the end of it, I still think there could be a better experience with Chomp. The lore in the game suggests that Chomp is looking for anything to eat, this includes but is not limited to bread and smiley faces. However, with Chomp's random movement, this can contradict Chomp's outlined goals. As I was watching a friend play the other day, personally, I discovered that even with the lolly packet, there is more to do in term's of Chomp's AI. This lead me back to the focus bread idea for Chomp which was suggested a few months ago (and after ages of consideration I decided to decline this change). I have been putting it off because any form of surgery into the AI is a big task, but after seeing that Chomp can bring a better experience and not a boring one, I decided that it was absolutely necessary to make further adjustments to Chomp's AI. This update brings a significant improvement where Chomp will focus the bread every so many steps.

And that's the other thing, initially movement with AI was confusing because I used timers instead of counting how many steps the clams move. This can actually cause a  performance issue where events are triggering but nothing is happening. I have completely reformed this so now it counts the amount of steps that Chomp makes per tile before changing direction (unless he needs to focus bread, lollies or a smiley face). With this change, it came a lot of bug fixes prerelease and smoothing out before I got it right back to wear functionality should be as expected. This entire week to this point has been absolutely brain busting. 7 hours a day (and a bit more) on stream with the community, working all of this out, has been tiring but for a good cause I believe.

For the full version, I will need to work on refactoring all of the other clam AIs to make sure they are following the same movement and bread focusing standards (for those that can eat bread that is). 

The second big change in this update is to level 4. I made some changes to level 4 to make it look different because the first 3 levels look very much the same, even though there are some minor differences. I believe this is important for new players in particular and for difficulty reasons being only the first few levels, but I think that having level 4 look almost the same as the first 3 levels is a bit monotonous. Whenever I saw someone get up to level 4, I always sensed that perhaps they are thinking "Oh my god, doesn't this guy have anything else in mind?" So I decided to change it a bit. Not too much... just a bit, so the game is a lot more interesting now.

CHANGE LOG

MODIFY:

1. Chomp AI has been enhanced to focus bread if he has not focused bread after moving so many steps and bread is in-front of him or next to him.
2. Chomp movement changed to count the amount of steps as opposed to a timer. This is also a performance enhancement.
3. Chomp will now continue eating bread from 1 to 5 steps after eating a lolly and there's bread in-front of him.
4. Level 4 layout updated so it is more visually different than the first three levels.

FIX:

1. Fixed an issue where pausing the game will now really pause the game.
2. Fixed an issue where opening the main menu would not really pause the game. Similar to the issue where pressing P would not really pause the game, this will not pause the game with the main menu open.

CURRENTLY IN DEVELOPMENT

1. More fixes following feedback for the shareware version.
2. Level design for the full version after doing an internal release.