Weekly Update – June 25, 2021

• I stuck to the plan this week (for a change) and finalized the Release 3 features. I’ll publish a summary in next week’s post.
• Added cell-based status effects. These are effects that are added when an actor moves onto a cell and removed when an actor leaves a cell. An example is a Darkness effect that limits the player’s visibility. This builds on the existing capability to add status effects by using an item or interacting with an object. This feature was unexpectedly difficult to add; a lot of the status effect code and Unity configuration needed to be reworked.

• Room features. Each room has a room type that determines what’s in the room. For example, a Shop Room contains a shop and a Treasure Room contains treasure. I needed to be able to apply different features to a room to do things like placing a trap inside of a treasure room. I added a base RoomFeature class and some child classes like ShopRoomFeature and TrapRoomFeature. This makes it possible to mix and match different features can create a wider variety of rooms than was possible using room types. I still need to fully incorporate this into the map generator, specifically by replacing the existing room generation with feature-based generation.
• Overhauled effect triggering. I was never comfortable with the way I originally implemented the configuration of status effects caused by an object or item. Effects inherited from MonoBehaviour so that they could be added to game objects in the Unity editor. It worked, and it was designer-friendly, but it was unintuitive (it wasn’t obvious the purpose of the component was to cause an effect) and too heavyweight (multiple effects required multiple components). I converted effect types to ScriptableObjects and created a new class containing a list of effect types. I called this class TriggeredEffectCollection and used it to replace the individual effect components. Adding effects is now easier (add/remove from a list editor in the Unity inspector) and the purpose of the component is more clear.
• Removed the limit of one static object per cell. Now cells can have any number of static (not moving) and dynamic (moving) actors/objects. For example, a cell can now have a floor trap and a statue. This also simplified the code because now there’s just a list of actors/objects instead of a list plus the static object.
• Extensive actor AI logging. Now the log very clearly shows why an actor chose a particular action and not others. Very handy for troubleshooting. The basic AI process is to 1) identify the potential actions and 2) select the best action. The logging explicitly indicates why potential actions were available or unavailable, and why potential actions were rejected or selected.
• Added new effects: Cure Poison, Darkness, and Paralysis.
• Added new items: Cure Poison Potion, Throwing Axe.
• Damage type resistance. Physical materials now have explicit resistances to different damage types. This will be used to do things like making an axe more effective against a wooden door than a short sword.

The plan for next week is to replace Room Type-based room generation with Room Feature-based room generation and start on two new features: Enemy Alerts and Knowledge. The former provides visual indicators for whether enemies have seen the player and the former varies the descriptions of things based on the player’s knowledge.