The Grid and Pathfinding (Patreon)

This is a screenshot from another game: Divinity II, Original Sin. A great thing about that your characters can move to any position, you can cast your spells with pixel point accuracy, and all the abilities seems to be resolved with radius and distances instead of confining to a grid. So the player felt immersed in the world rather than feeling like playing a boardgame.

This is the mechanic that I want to replicate.

Internally, the grid is necessary as it simplifies a lot of calculations and math. But, like Divinity II, I want to create the illusion that the world is grid-less. So that's what I have been working on.

You can take a look at the twitter link to see how it currently works.

One thing to note is the support for characters with various sizes. To get this working wasn't easy, but it is done. This means that in the future, the game may feature smaller units that only cover a single tile to strong boss-like enemies that covers multiple tiles.

Another new feature as a result of working pathfinding is the humble "Attack-Move" feature. When you click on an enemy outside of attack range, your character will now path to the target and then attack when in range. Of course, you can certainly move to an appropriate position manually first then attack, but the "Attack-Move" is a nice quality-of-life feature when you don't need that kind of precision.

You can take a look at it in action here: https://twitter.com/i/status/1239636331535323136.

BTW, if you are wondering why I am using twitter, its just a place for me to host videos. Many video hosts prohibits adult content, and pornhub takes forever to upload and encode the video. So twitter is the best I found atm.