Battle System Updates

In an effort to appear as if I am actually going to update this thing semi-regularly, I am going to semi-regularly update this thing once or twice. While this video gives a basic idea of the battle system, the main bread and butter behind the system is the potential to combo abilities, which in turn, stacks damage bonuses and provides additional effects on enemies.

Most of yesterday and today was spent implementing this part of the battle system (which amazingly, did not take long at all). As it stands, abilities have charge times that indicate how many turns must elapse before the ability executes. By carefully managing abilities, it is possible to set up your characters so that they attack a specific target in sequence, which triggers increased damage. Of course, enemies can do this too, so...

This essentially required storing the specific skill's target(s) at the time when it was selected. Previously, this was done only once (since abilities previously executed at the time they were selected and did not have 'charge times'.) Skills are then 'queued' up. Essentially, any time a character performs any action, all abilities in the queue are granted one charge. When the charge becomes greater than the required turn count, the ability will execute, in the order that they were first selected.

Of course, there were all kinds of little 'fun' issues that arose: for instance, if a character tried to use an ability on an enemy that had since moved from its initial range, the character would still attack it. Obviously not correct. Worse, if a character had been killed, but had an ability queued up, it would still execute it from beyond the grave. Straight up Freddy Kreuger shit. Or if an ability was queued up for a longer duration than it took for that character's next turn to arrive again. Just to name a few strange interactions that arose.

While many of those have been fixed, there are still issues. Corpses can block projectiles. Projectiles can fly over enemy targets if the character is standing on sloped ground (which leads to a wonderful infinite loop). If a character dies, its bounding shape does not reflect the position/orientation of its corpse. So on and so forth.

Despite these lingering issues, I can say with pretty high confidence that the battle system is mostly done, which is an extremely important milestone. Like more important than when we faked the moon landings to beat the Russians. You get the idea. As such, it's time to switch gears, which sadly, consists of designing several interior scenes and their associated cut scenes and dialogue. That being said, future updates will be sparse for a few days. (Unless Andy decides to hop on here for some reason, but let's be honest...)