Skills, Abilities and Combat

I've been hard at the code, and what started off as a bit of a head-scratcher ended up turning out alright in terms of things (seemingly) working nicely.

I've been implementing the character skill system, and working that into the code, to do all the things I want it to be able to do - and the brains trust has certainly thrown me a good challenge in terms of wanting it to be both interesting and diverse. That means it's a bit harder to get coded up front, but well worth it in the longer term. So, with a good idea of what I wanted to enable with the code, I managed to get the database set up to hold things reasonably easily, and the game code picked things up nicely.

While it might seem funny, that there's only two utterly basic abilities in the game currently (one to wait in combat, and the other to enter a defensive stance instead of attacking) there's a lot of underlying code written up to enable that and it's actually much further along than it would seem - which is a nice change. It's applying the right activation delays, applying an effect to a target - and that's going to work for ANY ability I add to the game.

I've also fixed a gabijillion bugs that have been irking me for ages, and it's lovely to see things coming together. The bug list is still massive hah.

Tomorrow I will start on one of the following: either start setting up the layouts and code to set quick-action abilities for each character so that as each character activates, their preset abilities will be easy to access OR I'll continue with the abilities and start writing the code to handle progressively more complex ones, where the abilities target others, or possibly areas instead of directly applying to the character that used the ability. Either should be cool to get stuck into.