March 2020 W1: Melee Combat

While the combat is far from finished, this week has brought some significant progress, and set the baseline for how getting and using stats is handled. Implementation of more combat features over the next couple weeks should be significantly simpler.

Combat progress

The primary progress made this week was the implementation of basic melee combat, and its integration with the medical system. The code still needs to be refactored to be more generic, and a little cleaner for use in other types of attacks, but it's written and functional, which is the hardest part.

The animation ends earlier than it should for some reason, but it's there
There are still parts of what I'd consider the 'basic' implementation that have yet to be added in. An animation for blocking does not exist yet, and the automatic behaviour to fight back isn't finished. The final vision is to have a combat system that is reactive between two combatants, meaning that they would each try to find opportunities to attack and defend accordingly.

Blocking an attack would reset any current action the character was taking, but a successful block will also slightly 'stagger' the opponent, giving a window for an attack. Different stances will be available for the player to set (Aggressive, mixed, defensive) and weapons will work better in some scenarios more than others.

Other Progress

This week also brought a whole load of revealed bugs, and a few fixed. Tooltips have been changed to have no delay, and follow the cursor. This has fixed the previous issues with tooltips sometimes not being destroyed.



Additionally, the crafting system has been completely redesigned in theory and will be redesigned in game to a graphical node based modular system in the near-ish future, likely after combat has been implemented to a satisfactory degree.

The way injury severity on critical attacks has been changed to an altered semi-logarithmic curve, resulting in a more midrange set of values, unless the damage is particularly high or low.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Development So Far

Image
Technical Planning Even after all the pre-development theory, I still felt like I had more planning to go. The technical planning was admittedly far less robust than the designing, consisting only of a single Draw.io flowchart with some terms that had more meaning to me than anyone else. Frankly, the use of such terms may have been a mistake. A class hierachy plan If it's not apparent, the above image is a flowchart denoting a class hierarchy and their functions in terms of interfaces. The interface names, while relatively self-descriptive, are also quite mundane and could potentially be easily forgotten. I rarely refer to the flowchart at the current moment, as my attention is consumed by the minutia of features rather than the overarching class system, however this flowchart proved incredibly useful in starting the project off on the right foot. Having an organised class hierarchy has saved me a fairly significant amount of work as far as refactoring and duplicated c
Read more

February 2020 W4: Combat Preparation

Image
The original intention of Week 4 was to implement at the very least the functionality for attacking with melee weapons. Unfortunately, that ended up taking a back seat to some much needed refactors due to added functionality to character skills. Refactoring Skills Originally, skills were stored within a C# Dictionary containing the skill name as an enum, and the skill's data as its key. This worked fine while the skills could comfortably sit on a single line, and didn't cause any ridiculous level of clutter, though it wasn't quite compact either. New skill functionality The functionality that expanded the data structure for skills was in essence a way for character stats (Attributes) to relate directly to how a skill effects an items individual stats. There was no previous system in place to relate attributes to skills or item stats, so the introduction of this system not only opened up a lot of versatility in balancing, but also introduced an entirely new conce
Read more

November 2019 W3: [Test_Graphics] Shader and Graphics Research

Image
I apologise for the late arrival of this blog post, the end of last week was a little bit hectic for me, and left me without time to write this up. Week 3 was all about research and learning the topics surrounding graphics and aesthetics for me. This meant lots of new information about shaders, mesh generation, volumetrics, post processing, and render pipelines. It was sometimes a little bit overwhelming, but overall a great learning experience. I feel pretty confident in saying now that I've got a basic and functional understanding of shaders and how they work, though there's always significant room for improvement. Also with this blog post comes a project name change. There are various reasons behind the decision to switch names, but (as you would know if you're here) the game now goes by the name "Project Astraeus", which I'm actually quite partial to. The Results In line with the topic of this week, the results themselves are quite shiny. I
Read more