Owlets are one of the core elements in the game we are creating called Trowl where the protagonist is an owl mother. As the game starts the player’s goal is to pick up and lead these owlets to the end of each level. The players primary concern when having picked up the owlets is to keep them safe and out of reach from enemy attacks. Each owlet that the player successfully protects through the level will give a slight bonus to the final score. The owlets also have a impact on the players “health” or in this case the amount of stress the owl mother is afflicted by. When picked up the owlets reduce the amount of stress by 20%, but they also increase the amount of stress with 20% if hit by enemies. The player therefore benefit from picking up the owlets and keeping them out of harm.
But the true challenge is to protect the owlets as they player pick up more of them since they pile up behind the player in a snake like form. The formation could look like this.
It becomes very apparent that the game play difficulty increases when owlets are being picked up since the player grows longer and more vulnerable to enemy attacks. This creates a more interesting and challenging game play.
To program this kind of snake-like movement was quite hard since I recently started programming and lack some experience. The easy part was to create the event were the owl mother collides with the owlet and to change their new position behind the owl mother. But at this point they were only following the owl mother in a straight and very stale line, which obviously was not what we were after. The difficult part was to create the snake-like movement pattern for the owlets. To be honest I have yet to figure out how to solve this problem, but I think I have a clue of how to do it.
Each owlet need their own position behind the owl mother and each owlet have to adapt their speed and position depending on the speed and position of the object in front. I will also need to create some sort of speed delay for the owlet’s when moving behind each other to simulate this snake-like movement pattern. Otherwise if all objects were traveling at the same speed it would cause the same stale straight line, which we do not want.
At least I have an idea of how to solve this issue, and I am most certain that I will finish this movement pattern in no time!
niclasnordberg 
Hi! To start of the way you write about this makes it easy to follow and understand why and what you’re trying to accomplish. You want the Owlets to follow the player in a wavelike movement, but all of the owlets should have their own speed and that speed depends on the previous owlet in the line.
You also explain why you want this kind of system by putting emphasis on not wanting all the objects(owlets) to travel in the same stale speed.
However you never really explain how you’re supposed to manage to create this kind of effect. There’s no examples of code snippets with explanation of what that certain code does, which is unfortunate.
Also, I got a bit confused about what you meant with “stress”. You never explained what it meant to you, or why it is important, neither how and why you would want to implement it as a feature into your game.
As final words, this post is interesting since it really explains what you want and why you want it, which is really good in itself since it adds a lot of value. But I as a reader, unfortunately have no clue how you’re supposed to do it
LikeLike