Day 2: All About Action

As anticipated, I didn’t get a lot of time in order to focus on 7DRL during this day, but I did advance in a couple of small ways that will be helpful for the rest of the event.

Progress

I set up a quick test room yesterday, and today I populated it with a basic monster and an item so that I could check things work correctly. I introduced a new item, the Mana Potion, which can be used to restore MP more quickly in a pinch, and I also added “Food”. I have ideas for a soft food-clock mechanic, so it’s nice to have it available. I’m not 100% certain I’ll actually get to implementing the overall system yet, but we shall see.

While doing that, I realised that the way I had my basic movement action setup wasn’t how I wanted. Because this engine is based on Acolyte’s Pledge, where every action needed to be performed explicitly, when you walked onto an item, you didn’t pick it up. I managed to fix that now, so that you can easily move onto things in order to interact with them (picking up items and descending down floors). I should add an “interactable” system though, for things like reading books on shelves or scribbles on walls.

The final thing I squeezed in yesterday is that I hooked up the spell interpreter to the actual systems that make combat effects happen, mostly for proof of concept, but it means that when you cast the right spell, it’ll actually damage enemies!

Next Steps

Today’s a much clearer day, so I’ll be going at the spellcasting system quite hard. I need to hook up all the pieces so that different spell aspects are actually accounted for when figuring out what spell to cast.

This includes things like picking the right damage type, as well as asking the user for proper targeting information, depending on what spell is being cast (something close, far away, etc etc).

I’d really like to be in the position where the core spellcasting mechanics and ui-flow are complete, because then I can focus on content (more spells!) and crafting a proper gameplay experience around it.

I’m planning to stream development on my Twitch channel today too, so you can look forward to that!