Frayed Knights Developer Blog Update

A new Frayed Knights blog entry on Tales of the Rampant Coyote covers the design decisions that went into a goblin dungeon called "Vertigo".
One issue Kevin ran into with the castle was that - being modeled somewhat after a couple of real-world castles - it was actually pretty dang cramped and hard to navigate. This was a design feature in the real world - castles were defensive structures, and you wanted an invading force to be stuck in bottlenecks. And while a human being can duck, contort, and whatever to navigate these confines, this doesn't work so well in a computer game. Simple is king where navigating and collision detection is concerned.

We've opened things up a bit, but Kevin found that "realistic" staircases just couldn't fit very well.

We needed ladders.

So now we have ladders. I had fun getting the code to work. I tested it out on Shiela's ferret. Training a ferret to climb a ladder turned out to be exactly like training player characters to do the same. This also means, technically, that I could have non-player characters climbing up and down ladders. I don't know if I really want to try and take advantage of that.