Dev Update - July 4th, 2018

Hey all! Vilsa here with another combat centered Development Update! We've been hard at work this week, and here's what we have to show to you guys!

AI Behaviors

We're starting up on AI behaviors that are driven by visual scripting for easy iteration and variety. We've got some basic movement working, and although it seems simple, it's the culmination of multiple complicated systems working together to make it easier for us as designers to go in and change how an AI should behave.

We've also got ability choosing implemented for AI, so now they can choose between attacking and moving. Once we finish up this framework, we'll be able to easily add more abilities to these choice behaviors, so AI can have more interesting behavior than seen previously.

Critical Hits

We've added randomized critical strikes to the game that can apply to normal physical attacks (but not bonus damage like flanking). There is about a 20% chance of hitting a critical hit, and hitting one will double the original damage of your attack.

Displacement and Collision

The main theme of the new skill-set that Jenna is going to be using in the VR center is displacement. Displacement is the act of a character being forced to move to another place. It's a movement type that checks for other characters and displaces them as well to simulate collisions. If a character collides with another character while being displaced, collision damage will be dealt to both characters (currently 3 collision damage per collision). 

Flanking bonuses can apply to collision damage, which means that a character in the middle of a chain collision can get hit by the character before them for 3 damage, and then collide into the next character ahead of them for another 3 damage, and then flanking damage will proc off of that second hit since it was from a different direction.

That's all we have for this Development Update! We're going to get back to work on combat now. See you guys next week on Wednesday for the next update!