Under Pressure - Devlog #2: States design!

📢 Under Pressure V1.0 is out for free on Itch.io! 📢

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At first I was looking for a simple, efficient, easy-to-update way to write down state graph.
With this short scope project, I aimed to improve my development process.
And by that having a graph to overall all game states was really important to me.
I also wanted to have a tool that run in local, not relying on web applications or licences.

So I decided to write my graph using Mermaid on Visual studio code.
Mermaid.js is very powerful and easy to learn. It has different graph types which useful (such as Mindmaps, Flowcharts or Timelines) .

In my case, I decided to use State diagrams. But I started to use some others for upcoming projects!

Design States Graph:

The game is mainly separate in two states, one per player, Diver then Kraken.
Then a "CheckGame" simple state evaluate if it's the end or not.

So at first we have a basic graph for whole game.

First Diver pick and play a card. Then Kraken pick and guess cards. To have more flexibility on all game component's behavior, I needed to have more states.

And finally, the game is a solo game so it needs to have a behavior for AI, with different information and behavior (different timings, AI "thinking", etc...)

It really helps me quickly write down different states and their substates.

Having this whole graph also guides me  to place the correct timing on all states. In order to have a smooth transition between a Kraken Guess, an AI "thinking" or Diver messages state are driven.

Under Pressure structure is based on Scriptable Objects events and a few managers. All Managers (UI, Sounds, AI, FX, ...) are listening to his needed states, and all are called simultaneously.

Here the link to my UnderPressure_States.md file: https://pastebin.com/KJsKGLzg

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