The two days I had off from work this week doubled my available dev time. Note those weren’t full days; they were just two extra 3-4 hour blocks of time similar to weekend work. A wide assortment of to-do’s got done, including minor tweaks and enhancements, bug fixes, refactoring, and some miscellaneous items. The general theme was getting the game to a stable, bug-free experience.
- New Abilities
- Turn Undead. Classic cleric ability that causes nearby undead to flee.
- Heal. Heals the caster.
- Self-Targeted Abilities. Abilities, such as Heal, can now be configured to target the user by default.
- Entity collection-specific Abilities. Abilities can now target specific entity or entity collection types. This capability was used to implement the Turn Undead Ability (it’s basically the Fear status effect, limited to undead actors).
- Interesting bug fixes
- Some enemies were fleeing from the player unexpectedly. Upon further inspection I determined that this only occurred when multiple enemies were present. Even stranger, when a new enemy spawned, an enemy that previously attacked the player started fleeing. It turned out that enemies were reacting to the movement events of other enemies. This shouldn’t happen because enemy AI contains an actor tracker component that limits the actors that the enemy will react to (typically, enemies only react to player actions). The actor tracker wasn’t being used by the enemy’s movement generator.
- I wanted to display bones on some of the spikes so I configured the map generator to randomly add a bone pile actor on top of some of the spikes. When I tested this, ghosts appeared where bones should have been. I knew instantly what had happened. The bones are configured to spawn ghosts when they are destroyed. The spike damage destroyed the bones in the first game turn, causing the ghosts to appear. This was an easy fix. I changed the effect trigger for spikes from Touch, which is applied each turn, to DidEnterCell, which is only applied when an actor enters a new cell.
- Other bug fixes
- Tooltips remain on screen when the Inventory and Ability panels are closed.
- Exception thrown when displaying the Abilities panel.
- The default player action for Rugs and Summoning Circles was attack.
- Cracked Eggs stopped hatching.
- Eggs weren’t changing into Cracked Eggs.
- Exception thrown when removing the Ring of Invisibility.
- Heal Ability wasn’t working.
- Closing the Select Cell prompt ended the player’s turn.
- Poisonous gas, once spawned, would spread throughout the entire dungeon instead of a limited area.
- Run Ability wasn’t working.
- Exception thrown when Fires burned out.
- Minor tweaks and enhancements
- Eggs now have 1 HP so they are killed in one hit.
- Destroyed eggs now leave behind the corpse of the creature inside the egg.
- Added descriptions for Cauldrons and Crystals.
- Grass is no longer damaged by arrows or other piercing weapons.
- Bones are now randomly added to some spike cells.
- When the game crashes before play starts, unusable saved game files are created. These are now automatically removed.
- The default action type for an Open Door was changed from Close to Move. Having Open Doors close when clicked was annoying because 99% of the time the desired action is to move into the doorway rather than close the door. Closing a door can still be done through the Inspect Panel.
- Refactored / cleaned up several classes, including the Cell class, which had gotten up to 1,000 lines. There was a lot of code that didn’t belong in Cell – handling projectiles landing on the Cell and handling actors taking items in the Cell, for example. I pulled this code into new static handler classes. This is a poor long-term solution, but it’s an effective way of quickly extracting code that belongs elsewhere.
- New automated tests: Ring of Invisibility. I haven’t added any new automated tests in a while. The Ring of Invisibility provides a good set of tests not just for the ring itself but for the Invisibility status effect as well. I intend to write automated tests for all Abilities.
- Improved ergonomics (for me). I’ve been having some pain in my right arm lately. I’m not an ergonomics expert, but after identifying the positions that caused my arm to hurt, I concluded that I needed to reduce the rotation of both my forearm and wrist. My mouse was too far off to the side, and I was holding it with a pronated grip (the normal mouse grip). I bought a smaller keyboard (the Logitech MX Keys Mini) to move my mouse closer to me. I bought a vertical mouse (the Logitech MX Vertical Advanced Ergonomic Mouse) to maintain a more natural, neutral grip when using my mouse. I’m very happy with the result. In the first week of use, the pain has mostly subsided.
Next week, and for the near future, stability and bug removal will remain the focus.
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