A Morsel of Progress
For my hot girl summer I sat down bright and early to get some Chronicles work done. It has been a few weeks since I've been able to touch it (where before I was working on it nearly every night) and I also left it at a point where the next task is fairly large and daunting.
Because it's mostly a grid-based tactics RPG, I want to create a generic actions system that I can use to define all of the different types of abilities with the following constraints:
- Be able to describe all targetable actions for player and enemy from basic movement to complex abilities
- Be able to query an action for targeting constraints (pattern, line, range, etc)
- Be able to query any action for the resulting turn state prior to execution
- Be able to build all actions as an asset in an editor
In game development these days I typically shy away from ultra-generic constructs because they tend to grow into more of a hassle as you scale in complexity but a large component of this project is for all game content on release to be defined in-engine so that non-devs can easily generate custom content.
In a perfect world I would love for a full editor that allows me to create complex abilities like teleporting player behind an enemy and pushing them counter clockwise. Multi-stage actions with multiple dependent targeting constraints will empower a ton of complexity and variety in the game's combat and so I really want to get it right.
Unfortunately! What that means! Is that I'm extremely blocked by analysis paralysis on starting in on this system. It's very big and has to be correct enough to be able to be molded and scaled into the future. It will probably be several sessions of coding before I even have something to show for it and so the whole thing puts me into a mindless coma of inaction.
So my dev-day consisted entirely of making the above little tile highlighting animation. I mean I want to be able to highlight tiles for targeting so you definitely need that! I dreamed of getting my entire actions system working at the end of the day yesterday but instead I have a little animation and a blog post about game development being hard.
All in all still very happy to have broken my fast on this project and I'm going to keep crawling into the breach until I finally get past this hump!
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@britown@blog.brianna.town