Eating some oreos while I write a quick update. I’m now 750 lines of code into my game. Pathfinding for the invading aliens works beautifully; There’s never going to be more than a hundred or so on screen at once and the board is pretty small, so I’m just running DFS for each alien on each game update. If that becomes a performance issue later, I’ll rewrite it as Kruskal’s from the endpoint and reverse all the paths as needed, but hopefully this will be good enough for LD18. The “Spud Cannon” is also up and running, grabbing an adjacent alien as it marches by and firing him as a projectile at another alien, causing damage to both. Progress since last screenshot isn’t really visible, so I won’t bother for now.

Next up on my list of things to do is to have actual player input, rather than just hard coding everything like I’m doing now for testing. After that, deal with levels, timer, budget/cost/score. Then weapon upgrades. Then game overs. Then build the other 4 weapon and 4 alien types. Then music and sound. So much to do! Time to get back to work.