Before now, I have only shown the progress of Dig Deep Dungeons in a fully-illuminated world, but one of the core principles at the heart of the game is darkness. The darkness is the unexplored world, the unknown chaos from which monsters are born, and the primary antagonist threatening the player’s character. Thus, sources of light become critical to survival and progress. Any action to be performed by a player’s character requires some amount of light. Light is also a finite resource in a number of aspects: light sources have a limited lifespan and burn out after a period of time, the light emitted from a source has a limited range which diminishes as the source burns, and the sources themselves must be purchased or constructed by the player’s character.
Building the lighting engine has proven to be a significant challenge, requiring more than a couple of refactoring passes and numerous tweaks. I thought I had everything pretty well nailed down last weekend, but while I was constructing a demo to show off the lighting engine I stumbled across a show-stopping bug (and then another and another). This is one of the reasons why I have committed myself to producing these demos — to give these things a good run-through before the code turns into spaghetti and becomes a nightmare to debug or change.
So after some serious rewiring and clean-up I can finally share with you this humble lighting demo.
