Weekly Update – September 3, 2021

• Launch: Nov 2022
• Current Phase: 3 of 5 (goal: working full demo)
• Current Phase ETA: Nov 2021
• August 2021 Goals: Screen Layouts: 100%; Hotbar: 100%; Abilities Window: 100%
• September 2021 Goals: Enemy Alerts: 0%; Abilities: 0%; Sound Effects: 0%; Character Window: 30%; Options Window: 100%

Screenshots

This Week’s Achievements

• Saving/loading Inventory and Hotbar state. The contents of each slot are now saved when exiting the game and restored when the game is loaded. This was more complicated than expected because the hotbar stores references to items/abilities rather than items/abilities themselves, and abilities didn’t have unique ID’s because they don’t inherit from the same parent class that actors and items inherit from.
• Completed the Abilities Window, along with all the supporting classes for Abilities – the main Ability class, an actor Ability Manager, an Ability Factory, an Ability Type scriptable object, and starting Ability Profiles.
• Drag and drop visual improvements – using highlighting and dimming to inform the player of which slot is being dragged from and which slots are eligible to be dragged into.
• Started and completed the Options Window. This window allows the player to quit to the desktop, quit to the main menu, or return to the game. I’ll add more options later on, such as turning music and sound effects on/off.
• Started on the Character Window. This window provides info about the player’s character. I’m still finalizing the layout and contents, but built a basic version with the character image, name, and class.
• Associated Abilities with Class Attributes. The benefit of this is that abilities don’t need to be directly mapped to classes; the class attributes determine which abilities are available. For instance, a class with a High Divine Magic attribute has access to the highest Divine Magic spells.

Next Week’s Goals

Next week, I’ll finish the Character Window and add the first group of Abilities.