Week 5 progress

Week 5 Gallery

This has been my favorite week so far! Turns out that going from 0 items to 6 and adding tougher enemies doubled the fun of the game in a few days and it feels less of a tech demo. I implemented a few extra items to test out the modularity of the system, including a range potion that makes you temporarily move faster and a ~~completely broken overpowered~~ necromancy spell that resurrects corpses to fight for you.

I also added a small widget to show the turn orders of characters, since it’s based on an energy system. Turns out that making turn resolution using systems (the S part of ECS) wasn’t such a great idea. Determinism was not guaranteed so predictions were wrong a lot of times. After quite a few hacks I managed to get it to an acceptable state. The problem with systems is that they are very much dependent on running once every frame, which is nice for real time games, but bad for turn based ones. If I had to restart the project from scratch I would use systems much less for the main logic, or I would just chain a ton of observer callbacks from a tiny number of systems. I would still use systems for stuff that gets done on every frame, like rendering, GUI and animations, and I would still use queries to iterate through entities quickly.

The AI logic is starting to get a bit spaghetti at this point. I was planning on adding some behavior trees or an FSM, but didn’t manage to finish it in time, so the AI will have to do with 8 levels of nesting for now…

But hey, at least I solved a bug where I was calling some render functions 16.000 times instead of… once!!! Just goes to show how crazy fast hardware is that I didn’t even notice this until I was looking in the profiler for something else entirely.