Week 9 -- Magic prototyping

Well, I'd hoped to finish my battle system prototype for this weekly update, but I have to admit defeat on that. I spent the last week adding spell-casting. (Just one fire-thingy spell. The point is to try out the casting system, not the spell itself.) The first steps went fine. But then I decided to try making it so that you can move, pausing your spell preparation, then resume when you stop. The state handling involved there is much more complicated than I'd realized, and I foolishly charged ahead instead of stopping to analyze it properly. The result still mostly works, and is kind of cool, but weird things happen. (Casting resumes when it shouldn't, sometimes it suddenly indicates that a spell is instantly ready and will cost -4 MP....)

But in the larger perspective, the prototyping is going well and is definitely successful. Just today I discovered that it's probably a bad idea to make you stuck in place while casting, which was my original thought for the most basic casting ability. Too annoying when the enemies are coming for you, especially if getting hit cancels your cast, which I think I do want to do.

I think I should go ahead and prototype all three main options for movement and spell-casting:

1. Cannot move while preparing spell, stuck in place.
2. Can move, but casting pauses while moving and resumes when you stand still again.
3. Can move, spell preparation continues.
   

Who knows, I may wind up just going with #3 anyhow. I want casting a spell to be somewhat challenging and dangerous (in that you're more vulnerable while preparing the spell), but not frustrating.

I continue to struggle with not knowing what all is available in Torque. I often find myself thinking that there's probably a built-in function to do something gracefully, but I don't even know where to look in the reference. Perhaps I should budget a couple of hours every week to just experiment with Torque and learn it better.

So I've fallen further behind my schedule. My goal this week is to absolutely finish the prototype and get started on the real game. I'm facing a schedule slip on my introductory-area milestone unless I have a very productive couple of weeks.