Being the last full week of the year, I committed more time this week, but still made limited progress due to unexpected issues on every one of the items listed below.
- Working build on Windows. Legend now runs on Windows. I incorrectly believed that the folder creation issues were Windows-specific and went down the wrong rabbit hole. It turns out that the same issues exist on the Mac build, but I didn’t encounter them because the folders had already been created. After fixing these issues, I was able to play the game on Windows. There are some minor layout issues to fix, which were revealed by running at a different resolution. And, thorough testing is still required.
- New abilities
- Shove. Shoves an enemy back one space and prevents the enemy from acting that turn. If the cell behind the shoved enemy blocks movement, the enemy stays in its current cell and is damaged. If the cell behind the shoved enemy contains another enemy, both enemies are damaged. A lot of coding was required to implement this ability because of the synchronized movement of the shoving and shoved actors and the different collision outcomes.
- Battle Cry. Causes nearby enemies to temporarily flee in fear. There is already a Fear spell that does the same thing, except that the caster can choose the affected area. I had the hardest time preventing the player from receiving the Fear effect. The code was difficult to walk through and over-abstracted. In the end I discovered that a non-obvious solution already existed within the ability configuration. Hours wasted…
Next week, I’ll address the resolution issues exposed by the Windows build and test the build more. This is a satisfactory milestone to end 2024 with, though not nearly as far as I had expected to get this year.