The Trial
Task Planning and Tracking
Over the course of the project it was my responsibility to plan out the tasks required to complete all of the features that I set envisioned. At the beginning of the project I took on way more tasks than I could complete in the time span of the project. This made it very difficult to make significant and noticiable progress towards the end goal. I was able to scope down the project and break tasks out into more meaningful smaller ones. This change made working on the project easier, as I always knew what I needed to do next, and resulted in a finished product that was more polished.
Ability Based Combat
The core mechanic of the game is to use your abilities to defeat enemies. Inspired by the game, Wizard of Legend, I wanted to create a library of abilities that the player could select from to change how they played the game every time. Being one person it would have been hard to create the amount of abilities that I wanted the player to have access to so I decided to define abilities in an XML. Using different classes of abilities, projectiles, buffs, and targeted, I was able to create many unique abilities that felt different from all of the others.
Experimentation with UI Buttons
Giving the player to the ability to select their own abilities to use in game was something that I wanted to do from the beginning of the project, but making a menu that was intuitive to the control scheme of my game with the systems I had in place at that time going to be difficult. I decided to create a simple UI Button for the game that would behave differently as it was selected and call a specified callback when clicked. This made things a lot easier when creating the menus. With the work that I did with the UI Buttons I feel comfortable moving forward in creating a UI System for my engine.