Week 10 -- Special attacks, varied enemies

Last week: Lots of fun with my battle system prototype, and a change of plans.

I added two special attacks (you build up to a special attack by hitting the enemies with normal attacks or your fire spell) and a couple of small touches (enemies bounce back when they run into you, etc.).

So I was finished with my originally planned features for the prototype, but not satisfied. I decided that I need to make it more interesting to be able to evaluate whether the ideas are really going to work. So I added multiple enemy types. We now have: normal, physical (resists physical attacks), spitting (fires projectiles, which you can block with your shield -- oh yeah, I added that too), magical (resists magic, fires spells at you), and tough (fast, hits harder). This was a lot of fun. My eventual goal here is to test out throwing a variety of battle situations at the player and hopefully require different approaches.


(Illustration: special attack 1, which knocks the enemies way back. You can also see a brown enemy shot and the end of a dead-enemy-go-poof animation, which was one of the details I added mostly for fun. Remember: placeholder art!)

I've added a couple of things that are more polished than what you might expect from a prototype, but they're all things that I'll need to do eventually and wanted to learn. For instance, I added a charge-up meter for spellcasting, which was fun -- and helpful for verifying that the spellcasting state handling was working properly. And now that I have multiple enemy types, I need to make it pick a group of opponents to meet a given total "challenge level," which is something I'll need to do in the real game too.

I continue to feel that I don't know TGB and TorqueScript nearly as well as I need to, so I'm rethinking my schedule. I'm afraid that if I try to start on the full game now, I'll make bad design decisions and waste a lot of time. I strongly suspect that I implemented the multiple enemy types prototype poorly. So I've decided to step back and take a couple of weeks to learn TGB better, the various builders and key features such as datablocks. I'll probably try to incorporate the things I learn into the battle prototype or other mini-prototypes to keep my morale up. My hope is that the time I spend on this now will pay for itself in faster and more maintainable development in the end.