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So, a big part of Immortal Quest is the spell system. The idea is that you have 4 slots for spells and you find spells during the game to build your “hand”. So different players can have vastly different experiences based on their loadouts, which should lead to some interesting choices, will you stack up on offensive spells or balance it out with defensive spells? Quick cooldown spells or more powerful longer cooldown spells? Can’t wait to get to a playable version and start playtesting it, should be quite fun! :D

For that I wanted to program the spell system in a way that makes it very easy to create new spells and mantain the system without the whole thing becoming spaghetti code. I’ve mentioned it many times here before, but the ECS system described by Brian Bucklew in this talk seems to be the perfect way to go about it.

I implemented an “Actor” component for the players and enemies, and implemented a “Spell” component for the spells. Both can send events to “Pieces” that are under it. The spells have spell pieces and the actors have actor pieces. The events have a dictionary of parameters, and each piece can alter the parameters before sending it to the next one in the list. That way the player can say “Hey I want to send an attack with Damage 1”, and a piece in him that says he is enraged can say “Hey, this attack that the player wanted to send… let’s make it double damage, so damage = 2 ok?” and so on and so forth until all the pieces that wanted to have a say in that damage message have changed it. So the actual damage code doesn’t need to know about enraged, and all of the “enraged”-related code is all tidy and nice in its own little script.

This is how my spell object looks so far, I created only one piece so far, a Spawn Projectile piece. By selecting the SpellID it will pull the spell info directly from the Spell Database, you can’t really change the spell info here, only in the Spell Database itself. You can however edit the pieces. Ideally I’d set the pieces up in the google spreadsheet as well, but that will be a task for another day…

The Spawn Projectile piece I created is quite handy, I can have fairly different attacks just by changing the values in it. I made a little “Activate Spell” button for the inspector to be able to test the attacks faster. Since I’m thinking of being able to setup the pieces in the spreadsheets as well I’m making sure I don’t have to actually drag and drop anything in there, just selecting with “IDs” which would be regular strings in the spreadsheets.

I implemented the angle attacks which I programmed as a task of the day a couple of days ago, it looks pretty cool :D Made a bool to control whether to shoot in order or shuffle the order of shots.

Next few days should be building up new pieces for both the actor and the spells, so I can start tackling the individual spells one by one. I also need to make the system of actually picking up and assigning the spells to slots.

Going over the spell list I realized that the spells can be broken down into 3 main “base-pieces”: 

Spawn Projectile (ex. Pew pew pew)

Spawn Object (ex. Summon Pet, Spawn Fire-wall)

Add Effect (ex. Heal, Freeze, Knockdown)

Add to Self

Add to specific Actor 

Add to Actors in an area)