Momentum is picking up after a couple of slow weeks puzzling out the abilities architecture. With the architecture determined, I was able to implement the ability that triggered the architecture exercise in the first place, Heavy Strike. This ability is a melee attack that does more damage, uses a different animation and sound effect, and shakes the screen more. I wanted to be able to reuse the existing melee attack action for this ability. The solution was to add more parameters to the melee attack action and set the parameters from the Heavy Strike ability, which is a Unity ScriptableObject.
After finishing Heavy Strike, I started working on another ability, Charge. This ability performs two actions in a sequence, moving the player and attacking a target. It’s one of many abilities that perform multiple actions. This presented a new dilemma – actions were designed to be executed once per actor per game turn. The rework required to enable multiple actions per actor per turn was significant. I found a better alternative: Action Steps. Action Steps are now the basic building blocks of actions. They enable a series of actions to be performed within a single game turn action and make creating new actions and abilities a lot easier. Creating the Action Steps involves extracting code from existing actions. This is in progress. So far, Action Steps have been implemented for selecting a cell and shooting a projectile.
To control the execution sequence of Action Steps, I introduced another new object, Action Phases. Action Phases define the sequence in which Action Steps are performed. Each Action Phase contains one or more Action Steps. Action Steps within the same Action Phase are performed concurrently. This allows Action Steps to be performed sequentially, in parallel, or with a combination of the two. Some actions, such as pushing and pulling, require parallel execution of Action Steps.
Next week, I’ll build a few more Action Steps (moving and attacking), which will allow the Charge ability to be created. I should be able to quickly add some more abilities. I’ll also post the pixel artist ad in a few new places.
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