Ability System and Basic Main Menu

Checkpoint 5 – Ability System and Basic Main Menu

Progress This Week

• This week I focused on implementing the ability system, and integrating it into the turn system alongside basic attacks. This once again turned out to be a lot harder to implement than I was expecting, as it required changing some of the turn management and hover and select systems in order to cleanly fit in. While I was able to find some resources and learn a lot in order to get these systems operational, this week was heavily assisted by generative AI, as the scope of implementing the abilities across the four heroes, all with differing functionality, proved to be a lot greater than I envision, additionally, the algorithms required for some of the checks proved a lot more complex than I had original expected.
• Hero Ability System
  • Each hero now has a unique ability that reflects their role in the party.
    • The guardian has a taunt ability. It targets a main enemy, dealing 75% of their attack stat as damage, taunting the enemy. Additionally, immediately adjacent enemies are also hit for one damage and are taunted. This status effect lasts for two full player turns.
    • The mage has a debuff ability. It targets a main enemy, dealing 75% of their attack stat as damage, and reducing its armour to zero. Additionally, immediately adjacent enemies are also hit for one damage and their armour is reduced by 50%. This status effect lasts for two full enemy turns.
    • The rogue has a AOE damage ability. It targets a main enemy, dealing 150% of their attack stat as damage. Additionally, two child rogue cards are summoned (for visual effect only), and immediately adjacent enemies are also hit for 50% of the rogues attack stat as damage.
    • The healer has an AOE heal ability. It targets any hero card, and heals everyone in the party for 35% of their maximum health points.
  • These abilities are presented as ability cards displayed beneath their respective hero card, and can be used when it is their respective heroes turn. The ability cards have a similar implementation in hover and select to how the basic attack has been implemented, and you can hover the cards to view their description during the heroes turn.

Above showcases the new ability system, specifically with the mage ability, and the rogue ability, incorporated into the existing hover and select system to be able to be used on their respective hero card's turns. It also showcases the order in lay bug of the cards, as the hero cards, when hovered and selected, as well as the hero cards when they make an attack, appear behind the hero cards or the enemy cards.

• Main Menu Structure
  • Spent a short amount of time setting up the functionality for the Main Menu system which includes a Start Game button to begin playing the game, a title, and a GameObject for the background, all of which haven’t been edited to incorporate art of fonts yet, but have fully implemented functionality.

Known Issues

• Ability limit bug
  • The ability system is intended to limit the usage of abilities to two per turn cycle, however, when I attempted to implement this, some turn cycles had two ability usage limits, and some had one, and I couldn't figure out why. So, for now, there is an unlimited usage of abilities, which unfortunately absolutely ruins the intended strategy of ability synergy and management, and the intended trade-off between basic attacks and using abilities.
• Order in Layer for cards
  • Currently, the ability cards and attacking hero cards are below the hero and enemy cards in the order of layer (or equivalent system in the canvas), and therefore it is tough to establish when ability cards are selected, or read their description to assess what the hero card is meant to do.

Possible Improvement

• The main improvements for this week involve resolving the bugs mentioned in known issues, and fully implementing the remaining minor features.
• These minor features include:
  • Some audio for attack hits and abilities.
  • The main menu with a:
    • Start button
    • And help screen for game instructions
  • A restart screen for when the game ends, to either restart from level 1, or exit to the main menu.
• Cleaning up the code, and finishing commenting the rest of the functions created to implement the ability system, as well as reference exactly where generative AI was utilised to assist in producing the code.
• If all of the above is completed before the end of the week, I would like to incorporate visual effects to provide the player with feedback when they inflict as status effect on the enemy.