Hello Bevy!

Welcome back! I've been working on a project inspired by Kingdom, using the Bevy Engine. It is both my first Bevy project and my first Rust project so it has been a LEARNING experience. 

I don't have any gripes with either technologies as of now. Bevy has been very pleasant to work with coming from years of Unity/Godot hobbyist projects. I feel like I am able to move quick and prototype this idea with ease since I don't need to deal with the bloat of something like Unity (Godot less so). 

The first few hours of developing were the easiest since I would just put everything into `main.rs` file but after a while of having something working (player input, player character moving on the screen, etc...) that main file started to feel cluttered and so I took to the internet to find suggested project structures. I ended up using a structure from BipedPotato's projects that worked well for me.

For those interested, this is how my project structure currently is configured:

Back to the project! After a few hours I was able to get one core feature. Prompts! A player can hover over a "build-able"  spot and it will prompt the player to pick 1 or 3 options for building on that spot. Though this looks simple it allowed me to solve for a simple AABB collision check to know when the player overlaps with the build-able spot to show the prompt. 

Once I was able to get prompts working (and player movement along with AABB collisions), I focused on a simpler system: spawning enemies and have them track the player position and follow the player. Now that was a lot of small progress even for my first time working with Rust! I compiled and voila the little proof of concept (POC) is coming together.

With some of the bones of the project laid out I had to work on an important part of the game. Actually replacing the build-able spot with one of the options provided. To simplify this I went back down to 1 option from 3 to lay down the foundation for the feature. As I saw that feature come together I was excited to see the enemy interacting with the buildings laid down by the player. And so I went ahead and worked on a attack system. When the enemy is closed to the building (a wall in the gif below), it will attack it and to add some simple flair, I added tween animations to go along with the new attack. Which resulted in something like this:

If you noticed the change in background color in the last two gifs, that is due to the next feature I worked on to get the main bones of this proof of concept done. We want to have the enemies spawn only at night so the main becomes: you explore and build during the day, retreat back to base at dusk, and survive the night! I hacked away for a few hours and we are able to get it a quick day night cycle along with making the enemies only spawn at night. Ideally they the enemies would retreat at dawn letting the player take inventory of the damage, repair, build or explore and prepare for the next night. For now this is what we have:

That is all I have manage to get done over the last 2 weeks of developing this project. I hope you enjoyed this post and continue to read along! 

Most importantly I hope that you feel inspired to take on that little game idea that is in the back of your head. I've only been able to spend a few hours a week on this project over the last few weeks but the hours add up and the project is taking shape!

Stay tuned and keep on gaming!