Development Diary - 20th July, 2019

Abilities

Over the past week and a half, I’ve been working on a more flexible ability system. Now all the abilities are tweakable. To do this, I’m heavily utilising Unity’s “Scriptable objects” system. Each ability is it’s own scriptable object, then each variable within an ability is also a scriptable object… That allows me to change things like arrow flight time, speed, arrows per wave of multi-shot, etc. Which clearly allows a lot more flexibility.

This plays into the upgrade system I have planned, allowing you to purchase upgrades to your abilities, such as;

• Increased arrows/wave of multi-shot
• Wider cone of the attack of multi-shot
• More health healed with leech shot
• Etc.

Characters

For the time being, I’ve only got one character implemented, the archer character. I’ve also started work on a warrior character, but I only have one ability for that so far.

Level Areas

I’ve also played around with displaying the name of the area you’re currently moving into. I really like the way this turned out, I think it aids the feeling of exploring real places and allows for some better storytelling later down the line!

My plans with this are to show the player where they are in a given level, then that can be improved by saying “you need to go to a certain location within the dungeon” as part of a quest to unlock a new character.

AI

One more thing I want to talk about is that I’ve started work on the AI within the game. Currently things are only implemented in a simple state machine - I’m not currently super happy with it, but it’s simple enough that it can be ripped out and replaced with something better when I get around to working on behaviours, later on