Needless to say, the lack of proper updates says enough in itself. I haven't made much progress in the past year, mostly due to real-life events and work. However, I decided to make this update to let any hopeful followers know that I am indeed still here, and I think about this project all the time, believe it or not. Currently I am brainstorming some new ideas for the project, and if anyone has any input I'd greatly appreciate it. If not, that's cool too! In the end this page is just documenting my own progress on this project. So, without further ado:

Game Maker:

So, with the now clear and definitive death of Actionscript 3 and Flash Player as a whole, it is kind of self-deprecating in a way to continue this project in its current form. I have learned a lot about programming in general, and especially about AS3 as I've worked on this project, however, as time goes on I slowly start to realize I'd probably be better off switching to a newer engine.

That being said, I already knew this was going to happen as I started this project. The main reason I decided to continue it was because I wanted to prove to myself that all those past unfinished AS2 projects and AS3 attempts were not a waste, and I would indeed one day finish a "legendary" Flash game. Therefore, switching to a different platform or engine or IDE would mean the original purpose of this project is defunct.

Either way, I still really want to finish this concept/project, be it Flash or not. And like the bolded title of this section, Game Maker is seeming like the best option. It has a programming language similar enough to actionscript that I wont be having too horrible of growing pains, but it also has a drag-and-drop form of scripting which would significantly ease any growing pains. Unfortunately it would also mean I need to restart from scratch, which I'm trying to avoid.

Enemy AI:

Alright, assuming I don't switch the engine to Gamemaker or some other system. Programming the enemies is my biggest hurdle I need to jump over. With some exceptions, the bosses in MG2 are essentially bullet-hell bosses. They basically just stay in a predictable area and hurl bullets and/or grenades at you. Again, with exception. I would like to avoid this. While I'd like to have some similarity, I would like some uniqueness to the bosses in MG Foxhound.

The problem is- I'm currently in an internal struggle with where to even begin coding the enemy AI. No, not the bosses, I'm fairly confident I can figure that out, it's the ordinary enemies. Currently my brainstorm is as follows, but I'm still working on how to implement it:

Enemy patrols pre-determined path --> Spots player --> ALERT PHASE: Follows and shoots at player --> EVASION PHASE: Loses sight of player, patrols player's last known screen --> Cannot find player, end of EVASION PHASE --> Resume patrol on original path

That is my current plan for the "phases" the AI will be in, however I'm still trying to figure out how I will implement one phase while also implementing the others. My plan right now is to have a separate enemy instance. This means, each ordinary enemy patrol will be a "uniquely" programmed enemy, not just spawned on a map switch to patrol that specific route.

Already the enemies are pre-placed objects that add themselves to an over-arching array, which is reset every level change. A possible solution is to have a preset path for each object in that enemies array based on which map is loaded. But this is just further brainstorming at this point.

In Conclusion:

While progress may be meager as of late, this project is not dead.