After literally years of research, brainstorming, analysis, and procrastination, the types of resources consumed by abilities have been determined. This decision has been drawn out by many dependent questions regarding Legend’s underlying resource management design: are resources finite or infinite? Is there a hunger clock? Do health, magic, etc. regenerate? Not all of the questions have been answered. I aspired to find the perfect solution, but the model is too complex to assemble, and I no longer believe a perfect solution exists anyway. I increasingly aim for solutions that are good enough, solutions that don’t offer complete flexibility, but are flexible enough. I embrace the resulting constraints, for they shrink the answer space, and foster creativity. And thus, at the end of the ability resource design journey, I arrived not at revelation but convention, with the health/stamina/magic trinity, a staple of the PC RPG.
- Ability resource consumption design. Abilities may consume stamina, magic, health, and/or items. Magic fuels spells, stamina powers physical feats, and items are needed for specific skills such as picking locks. Like health, stamina and magic are represented in points. The quantities of resources consumed by each ability will be fine-tuned during balancing.
- Player magic and stamina meters. Stamina and magic meters now join the Health meter. I reduced the dimensions of the meters so that they cover up a smaller screen area.
- New Action Step: Consume Resources. Luckily, I didn’t have to implement a new system to handle resource consumption; it fits nicely into the Action Step framework, becoming another building block for constructing actions. This was the most logical solution, since abilities essentially just invoke actions.
- Added Action Source to Actions. Actions are defined using the following structure: [Actor] do [Action Type] with [Item(s)] on [Target] in [Context]. For the Consume Resources Action Step to work, it needs the source of the action (the ability that invoked the action), so that it knows which resources, and how much of each resource, to consume. The action source has been added to the actor structure, making the structure now: [Actor] do [Action Type] from [Source] with [Items] on [Target] in [Context]. This required a lot of changes in the code, but was done quickly using global search and replace (which is surely an architecture smell).
- New items
- Magic and Stamina Potions. Self explanatory.
- New abilities
- Health to Magic. Recover magic at the cost of health. No class with healing abilities will be able to use this, since it would be possible to have unlimited health and magic.
- Magic to Stamina. Recover stamina at the cost of magic.
- Visual effects. While looking for a way to modify sprite colors at runtime (I need to display grayscale versions of sprites and make sprites appear frozen when they are hit with an Ice spell), I came across a Unity Asset, All in 1 Sprite Shader. It does far more than I need (at least currently), but it was very popular and highly rated (and on sale) so I bought it. Of all the Unity assets I’ve installed, this asset is probably the easiest to learn; simply add the component to a gameobject and, using the component’s UI, select the visual effects you want to apply. However, I don’t think I’m using it in the intended way. I didn’t want to add the component to the dozens of actor and item prefabs because I didn’t want the visual effect to be always on, and I didn’t want to maintain an extra component for actors and items. So, I just used it to make materials, and I’m applying the effects at runtime by changing the sprite material.
- Improved random Map Element selection. Previously, all Map Elements were assigned a rarity level, which served as the weight in a weighted randomizer. The problem with this is that the rarity distribution changes depending on the number of Map Elements of each rarity level. I’ve now split the selection into two steps. The first step selects the rarity level using a fixed set of probabilities. The second step selects a Map Element from the list of Map Elements of the selected rarity level. This ensures that Map Elements are correctly chosen based on the rarity distribution.
- Bug fixes
- Quick Switch and Hotbar slots still interactive after the player dies
- The action indicator cursor still appears after the player dies
- Enemies stop moving when the player moves out of sight
- Minor improvements
- The Escape key now cancels the Select Cell prompt. My goal is for the game to be completely playable using a keyboard and/or mouse.
- Ability resource consumption support
- Preventing abilities from being used if there are insufficient resources
- Dimming slots containing abilities that can’t be used due to lack of resources
- Tooltips indicate why ability slots are dimmed
Next week, the major task is reassigning sound effects. I’ve purchased several collections from the Unity asset store, but I recently pulled the files out of the Unity project because they were making project snapshots huge. Now, I need to bring only the sound effects that the game is using back into the project. Beyond that, there will be more play-testing and tightening things up.
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