Staccoons

Though i worked on other things, my main contribution to the project was the grid system the game is built on. Though i initially thought it a trivial problem, it slowly revealed itself to have a lot of complexity and edge cases as the project went on.

The main problems surrounded the stacking nature of the raccoons in the game. If the bottom one moves, the ones standing on it needs to move with it.

...but what if there's a tile blocking the upper ones from moving with the one their standing on? Then we need to knock the blocked ones down to where the old bottom one used to stand and have bottom one continue moving alone.

...And what if the tile they used to stand on just moved? There's a lot to consider and these scenarios just kept coming up as the level designers pushed the system to it's limits. In the end i rewrote the system twice during development to allow for more complex movements and more interesting puzzles.

We also wanted the raccoons to maintain a certain order in the stack so that the order of the selection buttons on the screen matched the order in the stacks. This meant i not only needed to deal with the complex movement of the raccoons but i also needed to sort them in the midst of all the already obtuse shifting and rearranging done for the normal movement rules.

Below are some illustrations of progressively harder movement scenarios and how they're resolved by the movement algorithm.

As can be observed in the pseudo-informative animations the system can be hard to wrap your mind around at times due to the derived behavior from all the rules interacting with one another. Though i did an acceptable implementation of the needed algorithm for the game, I'd like to revisit this problem in the future on my personal time to write a even more robust algorithm as the problem though hard, proved to be an interesting challenge to try and solve.