Monkey See, Monkey Do

I've finished - but not completely debugged - the mechanics of the guard movement.

There's no AI to speak of yet; I've implemented some test code whereby the guards simply mirror the player or, more correctly, the keys held down by the player. Here's a short video to show the guards all moving, falling into holes and re-spawning.

You'll notice they'll actually start to climb - and then subsequently fall - whenever the player tries to move up, regardless of whether there's a ladder there or not. I started to debug this behaviour and then discovered that there was nothing at all in the guard movement code preventing this from happening! Turns out that the code relies on the AI routines to not even attempt to move up without a ladder.

To this end I've started to comment the guard AI. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the logic for when the guard is on the same row as the player is quite straight-forward. That got my hopes up that the rest of the AI would be just as simple - alas that's not the case at all. It gets significantly more involved when the guards are on a different row...

I'm still not sure whether the guards escaping from the holes is driven by the movement mechanics or the AI - they don't yet do that correctly as you'll notice in the video. From here-on in it's a matter of reverse-engineering the AI, adding it in sections, and continuing to test the movement until I've ported every line and the demo plays correctly. On that note, the re-spawn points are deterministic, and I suspect there's no random element at all to the AI either - I can't see how the demo would work if there was.

Getting down to the business end of the port now!

EDIT: After implementing a small part of the AI, it seems that the guards' escaping from holes is actually driven by the AI, not the movement mechanics. It's possible then that the mechanics are complete and working. Onwards with the AI now...