Warscale 48 - Terrain elements and more equipment

Hi all Warscale fans (is there anyone?)...

The last two weeks were all about the terrain and I think I made a good progress. In fact it was so good I managed to complete two more items and debug the spell system with working effects.

What was planned
Board elements
The main task this weeks was to enable elements in the tiles. The elements provide some benefits (or hindrances) to the players.
Fire : +1 damage to any creature, +2 to a fire creature, -2 to a water creature
Water: +1 armor to any creature, +2 to a water creature, -2 to a fire creature
Life: +1 regen to any creature, +2 regen to a life creature, -2 regen to a death creature
Death: -1 regen to any creature, -2 regen to a life creature, +2 regen to a death creature
Air: +2 movement any creature, +4 move to an air creature, -4 move to an earth creature
Earth: Neutral. No bonuses or penalties.

Whenever a creature is standing over a tile governed by an element, the creature gets the bonus FOR EACH tile it is standing on. So larger creatures will be more affected by the terrain.

The game board begins with all tiles as earth element so it provides no bonuses or penalties. Whenever a creature related to an element hits the board, the tiles in that area switch to the appropaite element. So if you summon a huge death creature which covers a 3x3 area, then all that area with turn into the death element. If a player then throws a fireball, that area will turn into the fire element. If a tile should switch to an opposite element, it turns to earth instead.


So, after setting all the support I wanted to test it, so I decided to create the first board controlling item which is the Silver Long Staff of the Lake (read in the unplanned section). Turned to be an excellent way to fix a lot of bugs and optimize some processes. Also, I found that I should remove any range limit for the spells as it is a hard-to-explain concept and adds almost nothing to gameplay. I will still keep the summoning range for creatures.

Fixing item views
Some item presentation were damaged when I fixed a bug with the transformations. So I was forced to adjust the view matrices for the objects. Fortunatel it was easy to do. I used the time to fix the view of other staffs so not they are more prominent and you can better enjoy the artwork.


What wasnt planned.
Staff of the lake
After setting all the support for tile switching I had to create a test situation.
Silver Staff of the Lake
5-12 damage
{2} Turn a 3x3 area to water.

Creating the staff of the lake was a great exercise but also really painful to debug on the AFX side. On the end I got an amazing change of the board tiles.

Staff of Bat Regeneration
I wanted to add some effect when the staff healed yourself.
Staff of the Lake
1-6 damage. Gain half the damage dealt on each attack.

Staff of Fire Arrows
Platinum Battle Staff of Fire Arrows
11-22 damage
{1} Deal 2-12 fire damage to target creature or artifact.

The most powerful artifact up to date. This proved to be an excellent excercise of porting AFX resources to Warscale. In order to work fine with Warscale I had to separate the casting from the delivery portions. This is done because in Warscale the same casting portion can be reused so if I want to create a spell which throws 3 fire arrows at the same time, then a single casting effect is invoked but 3 delivery effects are fired. And I just reuse the same visuals.

Here is a composition with the items and the wizard.

Enable armies for kill the boss
I enabled armies in the kill the boss game. I will remove the single player mode anyway so this is just for testing purposes. That way I can test summoning creatures and artifacts. I had to fix a couple of bugs in the process.

New screen organization
I was thinking about this for some time. I wanted to decouple the PlayGUI from the controls. The basic PlayGUI is a TSControl which has all the other GUI controls inside. I decided to create a parent container so that is handles the TSControl just as any other control. This allows me to manage the areas more appropiately and allows me to display more information.

Video!
I havent posted a video for some time. I hope you like these. This is the wizard using the staff of fire arrows and the staff of the lake. Also, note the new interface configuration.

The plan for this week
I plan to implement my last 2 items. One is the Staff of protection which provides the wearer with 10 points of armor (about 10% damage reduction to any melee attack). This is quite easy to do. The second item is the Vermin rod which summon a beetle paying 1 mana (Giant Beetle 1 attack, 1-6 damage, 6 hp, mov 4). The staff of protection is quite easy to implement. The other one will be interesting.
From then on I will start creating some creatures and artifacts until I get at least 15 creatures and 15 artifacts.

Luck!
Guimo