Devlog #06 Fleshing out Powers

Dev Thoughts: 

I'll keep it shorter this time, since the last one was so long. When you're doing game development, remember to drink water and sleep on time. Sometimes, it's really easy to forget and then you feel verrrryy uncomfortable and then you can't concentrate and you end up wasting more time than if you had just taken the break and taken care of yourself. Be careful as well, sometimes, short term negligence can lead to long term health issues, so take care of your health, everybody. 

Making Powers Exciting

Basically, having powers is fine and dandy, but I wasn't satisfied with that, because I like overcomplicating matters. So I wanted powers to be able to evolve and grow. Something simple was having an enemy be frozen after a certain number of chills. This was really simple. Basically, all it is, is the script that starts the chill keeps track of the number of times the same skill is applied. If Chill is applied, then it pings the script and a number goes up. Once this number reaches a certain limit; aka 3 chills, the enemy gets completely frozen and stops moving for a little bit. Again, really simple, because I start to heavily overcomplicate things as I go on. 

Making Powers Exciting... Again

Yeah, you didn't think I'd stop at powers invoking more powers right? I had to up the game. I wanted different powers to be able to interact with each other. Like an elemental reaction when you chose the right powers. Kind of like how Hades has dual boons or modifiers to certain powers. So for example, when an enemy has the fire status on it and someone applies an ice status, the enemy gets a 'melt' status as well because the two elements are interacting. Sounds simple enough right? 

The main issue was that there are absolutely zero tutorials about how to do that! You would think there would be for something as simple as how to get ice to interact with fire, but nope! Nothing on the exact specific thing I need! At least not in the keywords I was searching. And I searched a lot.

Anyway, a lot of grief, getting too lost in thought and overcomplicating things way too many times as I usually do, I'm gonna cut the chafe and get right to how I managed to pull it off. 

So the simplest way is really just to have another 'status effect' that gets applied after every status. I call it a modifier effect. It gets applied after a status like chill or fire is applied and it checks whether both are present in the status effect list. If it is, the modifier carries out the added modifications, if it's not, then it just deletes itself. Probably not the most efficient system, and for as simple as it sounds, it took me way too many days of overthinking to decide that this was the simplest and easiest way. Still, I need to remind myself of that, so I can stop touching that system and finally move onto other things, which I am now. 

Anyhow, that was the powers for today. I'll get to more exciting things like the kinds of powers in future, but for now, the system is in place. I'm content with it.

Tene out!