Back to the brain we go.

I already had snails eating food in jars before, but it was kind of a hack. Each snail would just eat a bite of whatever consumable item was in the jar. When I stupidly decided to try to make a simple snail brain, I knew I’d have to make things like eating fit into it. Today I made a very rough version of something like that.

Over the past few days I’ve paused work on the brain to tackle snail movement on the client.

I ended up using Latchet, a Laravel-specific extended version of Ratchet. To start with I just wanted to get something running. I think I ended up doing this in a really roundabout way…basically we subscribe to a specific jar topic on the client, then ping the server every 5 seconds to get back the target position of each snail within that jar. The snail then crawls toward this target position. Target pos on the server is calculated using the snail’s currentSpeed and each snail crawls at the same speed in the browser, so in theory by the time the snail reaches its target position on the server it will also have reached the same location on the client…maybe…I hope. We’ll see.

I appear to have gotten myself into a bit of a mess.

“Make a snail brain/nerve-cluster for your snails,” they said. “It’ll be easy”, they said.

I took a one-month break from Gastropoda to participate in the JS13kGames challenge with a tiny game called Breaking Brad

But now it’s back to simulations! It’s taking me a while to remember where exactly I left off with Gastropoda last month, but now I think it’s time to figure out how to calculate a snail’s position within a jar. This is important because each snail will detect other objects (items, snails, etc) differently based on its senses. I have to have an actual location for both objects and snails. Right now I’m setting a position randomly when a snail is hatched in a jar, but I have to decide how I’m going to update this position as it crawls. Currently snails crawl at random on HTML5 canvas - they are already starting their crawl from their DB position, but pick direction randomly and then move back and forth across the screen using their speed attribute. So far all I have are some random notes:

It was a chilly summer evening when Valeros the valiant fighter and Merisiel the super cool rogue walked through the gates of a tiny abandoned farmhouse. They were heroes, you see, and here to rescue the people of the land from a gang of notorious thieving wanderers - the Sczarni - who have been terrorizing Sandpoint under the leadership of a punk named Jubrayl Vhiski.