GameDev Weekly: 21 September 2020

Changes

• Introduced basic Enemy A.I.
  • Made turns generic so both Player and Enemy can share the same systems.
  • Every second, the enemy chooses to either select or discard a card and combo where possible.
  • Entirely dependant on weights and dice rolls but works good enough.
• Added Heal and Charge support cards for increasing Vitality and Energy respectively.
• Added basic animations for attack and support cards.

Basic Battle System... Done?

Implementing some support cards was simple enough. I mean, all they do is grab some components and change data like everything else. It's not difficult to add any sort of card now, the scaffolding is all there. The main question now is "What?" rather than "How?".

I've been playing the game with my dumb A.I. now and then. It works, there's a battle system here even with just 8 types of cards. I can add more systems like status effects (poison, sleep, etc.), elemental effects (fire, water, etc.) and all sorts of other things to pad it out but the core is there and adding more isn't difficult. In any game, the current basic cards are usually what the player starts with anyway.

Next Up

So now what? I could polish what I have so far and release it for feedback. But I'll be optimising a single system without looking at the bigger picture. I need to get back to designing a vertical slice, taking into account the reduction in scope over the last few weeks, and pick the next major system to work on.

Thanks for reading.