[ian-reeds-games] Re: A few responses
- From: Ian Reed <support@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: ian-reeds-games@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 14 Feb 2013 23:15:26 -0700
Hey Zak,
Zak said: will the item show up in the unit's root menu as if it were a
skill when it is equipped?
I say: Yes, and later we may have a flag for changing the name of it
when it shows up as a skill.
In the beginning though, having a shot gun item equipped make a shot gun
skill appear seems reasonable.
Zak said: And if you do option 2 as well, will the skill only show up
once the item is in the unit's possession?
I say: Yes, it would have to be in the unit's possession and equipped as
well.
You also mentioned item points and I agree Allan needs something better
to do what he wants for having ammo for each item. It makes sense.
I need to put some more thought into it and consider unit points, item
points and team wide points all at the same time to make sure they will
work well together.
Zak said: Alternatively, would it be possible for an item/skill to use
up other items? That way you could stack arrows as items and have each
shot of your bow use one of them.
I say: Yes, this is a good idea. I hadn't thought of a good way of
doing it until just now.
What if there were just an item_cost= flag that you could put on a skill
or item.
So a long bow skill could have item_cost=arrow|1
This would also work for a long bow that becomes equipped and adds a new
long bow skill.
Ah, but wait. What if I had arrows, poisoned arrows, fire arrows and
magic arrows and I should be able to shoot any of them using my long bow?
The game needs to know that any are valid and that not all are needed
and the player needs some way to indicate to the game which type of
arrow they want to shoot.
I think the trickier part is how the player indicates which type of
arrow they are shooting.
I suppose it could just come up as a menu after they choose to use the
long bow skill. And if only one ammo type was available the game
chooses the only option.
I'm open to ideas on it.
Ah, but now the arrows also need to effect the long bow skill in their
own way, fire arrows dealing fire damage and poisoned arrows causing the
poison effect to the target.
Maybe in addition to the item_cost= flag I need to have an item_ammo= flag.
There could be special rules about ammo, it works like cost except that
a unit can use any valid ammo and the ammo affects the skill using it.
It could definitely have it's mod flags affect the skill, like
health_inflict_mod=5|fire for fire damage.
But currently there's no way to add a poison effect through modifiers,
the effect has to be on the base skill and it's a little strange to run
both long bow and then poison arrow as individual skills.
I could combine their flags and effects when performing the calculations
and logic, but I'd want to make sure this isn't going to prohibit other
situations from working.
So if the arrows did not have the useable_once, useable_forever or
useable_when_equipped flags then combining their flags with the long bow
skills flags seems fine.
If they did have one of the useable_* flags then someone might want to
say that stabbing with an equipped poison arrow deals less damage than
shooting it but still causes poison and they wouldn't have a way to do that.
Perhaps I'm getting into pretty rare cases, but I like to run through a
fair amount of scenarios before implementing something.
I'm really just thinking out loud and writing it up as I go. I
appreciate other ideas.
Thanks for the brainstorming.
Ian Reed
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