- New items
- Ring of Protection. Improves the wearer’s damage absorption.
- Ring of Evasion. Improves the wearer’s chance of evasion.
- New abilities
- Resurrection. Resurrects a targeted corpse. I was pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to implement this. It was 95% accomplished in the Unity Editor leveraging existing capabilities.
- Fear now works on the player. The Fear ability, implemented several weeks ago, only worked on enemies. It needs to work on the player too because an enemy may have this ability. Also, I debated whether the caster should be affected if a Fear spell’s area of effect included the caster. I decided that gameplay would be more interesting if the caster was also affected. This forces the caster to be more careful about choosing the area of effect.
- AI can now be applied to the player. This enables status effects that temporarily take control of the player, such as Fear. This required a lot of work to implement. I originally assumed the player wouldn’t need AI, and that assumption was reflected in multiple code locations that needed to be modified. This enables some interesting potential future capabilities. For instance, an AI could be written to simulate playing the game.
- Fixed several bugs related to torches. Torches have been the source of many time-eating bugs. The underlying logic is undoubtedly overengineered. Torches are designed to be lit when placed in a Quick Switch Slot, and extinguished when placed back in inventory. When in a Quick Switch Slot, they generate a light tied to the carrier’s position. Lighting and extinguishing torches is handled by a Convert Item effect, which destroys the original item and replaces it with the new item. This effect is triggered by moving the torch in or out of the Quick Switch Slot. I’ve spent far too much time getting this all to work. Bug fixing has been arduous because it requires tracing through a sequence of triggered events rather than walking through code line-by-line. The implementation had to be simplified, even if that meant hard-coding. I settled on changing how Convert Item worked. Instead of replacing an item, Convert Item now keeps the original item and changes the item type and some other item attributes. It’s not as clean, but it gets rid of item destruction and creation (and the logic triggered by those events). It’s also preferable from a performance standpoint, but that was a minor concern.
- Changing levels is fully working (again). I’ve been play-testing on a single level for months and broke most of the functionality around changing levels (example: going upstairs to the previous level placed the player on the upstairs cell rather than the downstairs cell). To support the new way that actions work, I had to add Ascend and Descend actions. I discovered some functionality that had never been implemented, for example preserving Quick Switch and Hotbar slots. This was a little tricky because the Quick Switch slot state is part of the standard actor inventory (as selected items, decoupled from the UI), while the Hotbar slot state is housed outside of actor inventory as it’s only needed by the player.
- Automated tests added for potions, scrolls, and rings.
Next week, I’ll keep fixing the known bugs and play-testing to find more bugs. This will continue until the game is in a state where I can play it for an extended length of time and not encounter a single error in the log or exception. I’m getting there…
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