Weekly Update – April 30, 2022

I got off to a great start last weekend, but the weekdays were consumed by my full-time job. I now have four weeks of time tracking data and will share a separate post on that in the coming week.

• New ability: Fireball. This ability shoots a projectile at a nearby cell and creates fires in the 3×3 area around the cell. Much of the implementation effort involved supporting code rather than the ability itself. The Create Actor Effect was extended to allow actors to be created in multiple cells at once. I consolidated the Effect.Cause(Actor) and Effect.Cause(Item) into one method, Effect.Cause(Entity) (the Entity class was introduced as a parent of Actor and Item after writing the Effect code. I fixed existing bugs – items in cells weren’t being destroyed by fire, the select cell prompt was wrong, etc. All this work will make implementing other abilities that are projectile-based spells easy to implement. In most cases, this type of ability can be created exclusively in the Unity editor.
• Refactoring: StandardMeleeAttackAction class. Melee-based abilities vary in terms of targeting, area of effect, sequence of events, animation, and stat modifiers. I’m still determining how to architect a solution that enables melee abilities to be easily created, modified, and maintained. The starting point is the StandardMeleeAttackAction class, which is responsible for executing standard melee actions. It actually does much more than it should, and the things it does are the building blocks for the melee-based abilities. I cleaned up this class and moved a lot of the logic into other classes for better reuse.
• Pixel artist job ad. I’m at the point where I need to start getting original art in place. It’s going to take some time to find an artist (or artists), and much more time to create the new art assets. I wrote a job ad for a pixel artist and will post it in a few places next week..

Next week, I’ll finalize how melee abilities will be implemented and build out one or two melee abilities. I’ll also post the pixel art ad.