After wrapping up development on Flewberry and moving back into college, I finally returned to development on Garb & Corncob! I spent this month continuing work on the battle system. Check out what I’ve accomplished!
I previously discussed the game’s 4 planned status effects. I implemented 3 of these effects at the beginning of the month: depression, stun, and burn. At this point, status effects would not expire over time, which lead to the humorous issue of Corncob being permanently stunned.
I then implemented the 4th status effect – yucky – and implemented status effect expiration. I also heavily optimized the code for handling fighters in battle. I originally used separate scripts for Corncob and enemies, but I realized that much of the code contained in these scripts applied to all fighters, regardless of side, so I combined this shared code into a single script. Of course, some of the code remained exclusive to either Corncob or enemies; so I kept the separate Corncob and enemy scripts and simply derived them from the script containing the shared code.
With status effects working for Corncob and the 2 fighter types linked, implementing status effects for enemies was a snap! I only had to make minor changes due to the differences between how Corncob and enemies perform actions (Corncob reads player input, while enemies randomly select an action from their repertoire).
For organizational purposes, I sketched up some custom icons for my enemy and action scriptable objects. I have these 2 types of objects stored together, but they originally shared Unity’s default scriptable object icon, making the assets a bit difficult to navigate. Luckily, setting custom icons in Unity simply entails placing a specifically-named image into the Gizmos folder. Now I can easily determine the 2 object types from each other. You know what they say: neatness counts!
Unfortunately, spending time setting up my Twitch channel and dealing with illness left the latter half of September devoid of screenshots. But fear not! Work is still getting done, albeit at a slower pace right now do to this little hiccup. For now, I am continuing to implement battle mechanics. Once the battle system is done, I plan on fixing up a few things based on what I learned during Flewberry‘s development, and then I will dive into creating the game’s boss battles, which will function a tad differently than regular battles. So get hyped and stay tuned as I work to bring these plans to fruition!
Alex Garbus 