Towergirls

Unity Port: Update 4 - Battles

Added 2019-03-18 04:40:08 +0000 UTC

You sort of spend a lot of time in Towergirls: the Game killing things. With this in mind, there are two areas that I wanted to improve with the Unity port and battles; Speed and Ease of Use.

In the past, you'd go through each of your party members and assign actions, and then every entity would play out in order of Initiative. The orders themselves weren't that quick either- it took something like 40 frames (1.3 seconds) to move up to the enemy, another second or two to play an animation if there was one, and then another 40 frames to return to the original position. This meant something in the order of 4 or 5 seconds to perform one action, of which there were typically many in battles. This was a massive oversight and made battles feel repetitive, slow, and not especially interactive.

We've naturally done away with all of that. Instead of assigning actions for every character, you simply assign an action and that character acts right away. This has made coding initiative considerably easier, and opens up the door to potentially assigning multiple actions per character, or other such combat overhauls. It's also considerably more stable, as we can mostly keep all of the action/targets/order information contained within the currently acting entity. The animations are much more crisp and snappy as well; it now takes something like two seconds for an entire action to play out, which makes battles considerably faster.

Here's a video of Ser being leveled up and then battling some debug Penguines. Ignore the 'Back' bug while leveling up pls, I fixed it and don't want to re-record the entire video.

Ease of Use was another issue. I'd originally planned to have favorited abilities appear and be useable in battle, to alleviate having to hit 'Spells' and then a Spell, or similar for abilities. Doing this in Unity is considerably easier, and more stable, and I've learned to ensure that code is rugged this time around. In Unity Towergirls, when you are allowed to give a character an action, all of your favorite Abilities and Spells will appear right away (provided you have favorited them). Using abilities should definitely never crash the game. The magic of null checks. Additionally, when attacking or using an ability, if there is only one valid target the ability will be used right away.

Using Bless (no particles yet).

I was considering doing a longer post elaborating on the design inspiration and philosophy behind the talent trees and attributes, but that'll be saved for another time. Here's two more videos of some spells being used.

Fire Strike and Bolt. Damn Penguines kept defending.

Everyone's favorite spell, Spider Swarm.

A tech demo is looking potentially, maybe feasible towards the end of this month. If the stars align I'll make another Unity Update post with a link around then. And, as always, here is the current progress on the various subsystems.

Bottom Bar (dungeon and territory)

==== Pretty much done

Character / Enemy Stats

==== Pretty much done

Dungeons

==== Rooms mostly completed

==== Encounters partially completed

==== Transition to battle completed

==== Return from battle completed

Inventory

==== Pretty much done

Items