Developers Log. Development Date 21 - Abilities and Combat

This week I had to do some of the awkward parts of being team lead, namely having a discussion with a team member about their time management in regards to the class work. Overall I feel it went rather well, we were both able to express some concerns and gain a better understanding of each other. It was a good experience.

Within the realm of programming I have been working on a combat system. We have decided to have an ability based combat, rather than a Ninja Gaiden style of hack and slash style using a physical weapon. We still lack a concrete vision for the controls for the combat- so I leaned on Ross, our design lead, a lot this week to help find the direction in which to implement the system.

Currently we have an AbilityController component that spawns an Ability Entity. This allows each ability to have multiple components. Using an Entity allows the spell to either follow the player, or be projected out.

I've only integrated just one ability so far. It's a gravity pulse that, when triggered, finds all of the non allied characters around the player in X radius and flings them in the direction between them and the player, but with a much larger force, so that they go flying past the player. This simulates the player drawing gravity in towards him/her with great force for a split second. It's quite fun to blast two guards on either side of you and watch them fly past each other in the air. 

I had to make some changes to the AI that Ron has been working on, as he wasn't using the physics body component, and was absolutely setting the position each update. This prevented me from being able to throw the characters, since they would just instantly revert their position and no longer have any forces applied to them. 

Moving forward I will be creating a character class that will serve to be a player, citizen, guard, etc. Simply adding different components, such as an input component or ai component, will make all of the difference for what the character is.