This week, there were lots of miscellaneous improvements that stemmed from play testing. The summoned swarm of giant rats continued to be a source of both AI improvements and entertainment. I took great sadistic pleasure in hitting one of the rats to turn it against me and then watching its brethren surround it and rip it apart in my defense. The Conjurer class is going to be fun…
- AI enhancements
- Summoned actors now turn hostile if attacked by the summoner.
- Actors will now attack the closest target rather than an arbitrary target.
- Actor items now transfer to the actor’s corpse. Previously, when an actor died, all of the actor’s items were added to the cell that the actor died on. Now, the items are contained in the actor’s corpse and can be taken by inspecting the corpse.
- Random actor items can now be limited to specific item types. This enables actors to carry items that are more applicable to their descriptions. For example, a bandit may carry some gold and throwing knives, while a wizard may carry some scrolls and potions.
- Actor actions. That actions that can be performed on an object or item are defined by that object or item. Previously, any actor could perform these actions. This didn’t make sense in some cases. For example, a blue slime isn’t intelligent enough to open a door (and doesn’t have hands of course!). Actions that an actor is capable of performing can now be defined.
- Extended Tier system to actors. Each item has a Tier attribute that indicates the item’s power relative to other items. Tier is used during map generation to ensure that the items placed on the map are appropriate for the dungeon level. I extended Tiers to actors for the same reason. Plus, for actors that have randomly generated items, the possible items can now be limited to the actor’s Tier.
- Gold is represented as an inventory item for non-player actors. The player’s gold is tracked and displayed in a counter rather than a physical item in the player’s inventory. Now that other actors can carry gold, gold needs to appear as an item that can be taken in the actor’s inventory. When gold is dragged into the player’s inventory, it is added to the player’s gold counter and removed from inventory.
- Actor sprite support for map themes. Tiles, such as floors and walls, have had theming (caves, dungeons, etc.) from early on. Changing stairs from tiles to actors necessitated adding theme support for actors too. This was trickier than I anticipated. The implementation for tile themes wouldn’t work for actors. The solution was to set the sprite during actor instantiation, based on the theme of the cell where the actor was located. But, that didn’t work when I tested it. It took me a while to realize what should have been an obvious problem – actors were instantiated before their locations were set, so the instantiation method didn’t know which theme to apply. I added an optional parameter to the instantiation method for the theme. It’s a bad hack, but it works and its scope is limited (there are very few actors that will have a different sprite for each theme).
- Bug fixes
- Tracked actors aren’t re-evaluated when an actor’s attitude toward the player changes
- The camera doesn’t follow the player when the player was temporarily controlled by AI (such as under the effect of a Fear spell)
- Rats can be summoned in walls
- Rats are able to take items
- Dragging from the hotbar causes the screen to scroll
- Clicking the hotbar after scrolling the screen causes the player to move to the cell under the clicked hotbar slot
- The default player click action for a dry fountain is attack
- Mass Fear stopped working on the player
Next week, there will be more miscellaneous improvements as I work toward making Legend fully playable. I need to stop putting off the decision of how to limit spell and ability use. This decision is required to balance gameplay. Currently, spells and abilities can be used without limits, making the game far too easy.
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