Ai dilemma and sprint 3

So initially we were going for an implementation where additional King Dodos would be created once a group of dodos branches off. However, after talking with Kamron over the weekend and then with Troy and Bob during class, we've decided to do a single King Dodo implementation instead. Due to the short development time we have until alpha, we are going to move multiple King Dodos into the beta if need be.

For this next sprint, I am creating the single King dodo implementation as well as an EMP "forget" trap which causes the king dodo to forget everything it has learned. I will also be reworking the inventory system a little bit after discussions of traps. We observed that each trap is more of a category as opposed to a single trap. For example, a projectile trap category would contain a cannon trap and a cannon + trigger trap. Both are accessible as a dropdown tab after selecting the category of trap. So I will need to alter my code and add an additional layer of complexity to my inventory system

Sprint 2

For this second week, I've finished restructuring the majority of the backend to centralize things a bit. This includes having a dodo manager systems that allocates all the dodos initially so we don't have to allocated dodos during run time. This also makes life easier for the garbage collection because all the dodos will be deleted after the game not mid game. In addition to memory optimizations, the manager also contains a list of squads. These squads will be used for the branching of dodos and the idea of a king dodo leading the following dodos to safety. A major concern we had was figuring out how to simulate the dodo's ability to forget, the API only gave us the ability to add penalty cost to a particular region and we were afraid to change variables directly because we don't know if any other variables or processes are dependent on it. Luckily, I have found a way to backup the state of the entire grid at a certain point in time and can easily revert back to it as well. This ended up solving two problems, the EMP "dumb" blast we wanted to implement as well as dodos unlearning when the king dodos die. Unfortunately, there are several technical problems hindering our implementation. The most significant one is determining what it means to be a new branch and when is it appropriate to have a new king dodo leading it?

I was quite happy about was the inventory system that I finished. I've exposed numerous variables out to the designers and was very happy to see Eric easily adjusting the inventory to fit his particular need.