This week’s focus was on expanding Action Steps and Abilities. A big chunk of time went into solving an issue with Action Step sequencing. An action’s Action Steps are instantiated and queued when the action is instantiated. A manager class then executes the Action Steps in order. This is a problem when an Action Step depends on the outcome of a previous Action Step, for example selecting a cell. I solved this problem by passing the action to each Action Step constructor and using the common properties in every action to pass values (every action has an actor performing the action and optionally, a target entity and entity that the action is performed with). It’s an imperfect solution but I needed to move on.
I also resumed the practice of adding at least one new Map Element each week.
- New Ability: Charge. The Charge ability causes an actor to move up to several cells in a straight line and perform a melee attack within a single turn.
- New Action Steps: Move and Melee Attack. These Action Steps enable an action to move an entity to another cell and perform a melee attack, respectively.
- New Map Element: Spikes. Spikes simply cause damage when an actor walks on them. The player will have different ways of dealing with these, and they can also be useful in some situations, for example pushing an enemy onto them. They’re currently placed in a random row or column within a room.
- Refactoring. Redundant parameters.
Next week’s goals are undecided. I’m due for a round of bug fixing; there are a number of known issues that I’m able to work around during playtesting but must be removed before release. I also need to keep the pixel artist search moving forward by posting in a couple more places and contacting the best artists from the original post.
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