Abilities are Taking Forever
Abilities. Good, I spelled that right. For the longest time Visual Studio’s auto correct would change ‘ability’ to ‘abilty’. Code Typo’s are the best, but not as awesome as Python typo’s. I digress, I’m supposed to be talking about abilities.
This Week, I’ve been working on the many abilities my game has to offer, and I’m starting to regret the way I’m implementing them. It’s not that I think they offer bad gameplay or take away from the game, it’s just they take a hell of a lot longer then I anticipated. My abilities are done differently then most games; instead of giving you a bunch of different abilities which you normally use 3 of, you get 3 abilities with their own talent tree. the ability’s talent tree lets you modify the ability to (hopefully!) suit whatever play style you have.
For example, one of the abilities I made this week lets you throw an IED at a location, which then explodes after a short duration. By changing different talents, not only can you change normal stats such as: damage, cooldown, and area of effect of the IED, you can add different effects like: setting the ground on fire, or slowing all targets hit.
Anyways, cool stuff. The problem with them is not only do I have to code the, you know, actual ability part, but then there’s the whole talent tree and all those effects to code. It’s not really that difficult, just extremely monotonous. It has also made me realize just how much more art I’ll need for them. For each ability, there are around 10 talents. Each talent needs its own icon image. Which means that having 5 classes with 3 abilities each at 10 talents per ability, that’s 150 different icons me or an artist needs to make… and that’s not even taking into account party member’s abilities.
Here’s a screenshot of what I’m taking about, These are the abilities for the Scavenger class:
Some of you keeners out there may have noticed that there are 4 abilities on this screen. Well, there are actually 4 abilities per class, however one of them (Endurance) doesn’t have an active portion to it. It mainly contains passive bonuses, such as attack speed, dodge, critical, etc. It may also be exactly the same for each class… enjoy!
