Hey people!

This post will be about different movement types and weapon stat modifiers which have been included in the last two weeks. Let’s dig in!

Flying Unit Movement

This is one functionality that scared me a lot on a technical side, however it has proved slightly less challenging than expected, actually. All I had to do was to tag terrain which affect foot units, but not flier movement as “Obstacle_FlierFree”. This includes mountains, water and so forth. Then, before scanning the grid, I removed these obstacles’ colliders, so the system views the tile as “walkable” for fliers. Of course, I would put them back if we were calculating for a foot unit.

I also made another tag “Obstacle_FlierBlock” for obstacles that cannot be skipped over by fliers. This includes walls connected to a ceiling, some buildings and some other potential obstacles.

I am still debating whether or not to include an obstacle where fliers can fly over, but cannot land on. This would include stuff like lava/fire spots or endless pits.

Foot Unit Movement Penalties

While we’re on the subject of terrains, I also added the terrain movement penalty system. These penalties will affect mounted units twice as much as regular foot units. At first, I was debating to add the double penalty to armored units as well, but I figured their movement was already low enough. I’ll see during the test phases if that is legitimate or not.

When it comes to how I implemented the movement penalties, I added a box collider with a predefined penalty delta which is used in the pathfinding algorithm to prioritize the shortest path possible, while taking into account those penalties. This is how the box collider looks inside the game engine.

This was a tricky part of the pathfinding system to find, however, I am very much pleased with the results. Even moreso because these are dynamic properties, so I could add some temporary penalties, or intermittent penalties.

Weapon Stat Modifiers

Similarly to Fates’ weapon system, weapons have stat modifiers to help differentiate them as they do not have a durability system. Some might argue that an infinite use system oversimplifies the fighting mechanics, however, I am positive that the low inventory slots (3 weapons and 3 items) coupled with the variety of weapons available and each weapon’s specialty will all aim towards a tedious inventory management.

This being said. Weapons tend to have various uses, depending on their weapon ranks. Lower ranked weapons have higher downsides to compensate for their strong sides. For instance, a smaller axe might have lower Damage, but will boost Speed or Skill slightly. These stats mods can be either positive or negative, depending on the weapon itself. However, higher ranked weapons tend to have mostly upsides.

The stat mods system is already in place, have a look at its first iteration.

Character teaser

Last week, I teased Denault, the Wyvern Rider.

This week, Milo.