Hall of Stars - Interactable NPC’s, Fun Facts and a Loading Screen

I’ve gone ahead and added NPC’s to the project rooms, to bring some more life to them. I had to rebuild/refactor some other things in order to implement this, for example the API (which handled requests single-threaded). I put some time into the pixel art for the NPC, which turned out pretty well (my expectations weren’t very high, art is not my strong suit , thanks @evmaagca for the advice ). The walking logic was pretty doable, but it kept walking into the walls, so I had to implement a way to keep it wandering around it’s spawn point. It now has to fetch alot more stuff from the API, that caused loading times to increase significantly. So I added threading and other small optimizations to the networking. Thanks to @mixidmb for fixing a bug with Stardance Stats where it would not fetch some projects that were created later on in Stardance. And ofcourse thanks to @torkel for supporting my Stardance Influencer journey

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New Features:

• Interactable NPC’s: NPC’s with object- and playercollisions, who can show a dialogue upon the press of a configurable keybind. It wanders around a specific area around it’s spawn point, which can also be configured. It changes faces and shows a keybind hint when you enter the interaction range.
• Fun Facts: Each project room now contains a Starling NPC, who tells you three fun facts about your project. Such as project hours, leaderboard ranks, etc.
• Loading Screen: A nice-looking loading screen to keep the players attention when the start-up takes longer than 200ms!

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Future Plans:

• Representative Rooms: I wanna add more objects to the project rooms that represent a specific stat on that project. For example spent hours, earned stardust, etc.