Ability inability.

Progress on the game's code has started. Whoooo!

The first thing I'm coding is the ability system because it's basically the crux of the game. As a tactics game that's trying to emphasize tactics, the abilities are extremely important. It took me a long time to figure out how to properly code the system to be as flexible as I need, but I think I've succeeded. The system itself is just starting, but I now have a clear idea of how to proceed.

I made the bold (read: stupid) decision to hard-code each ability since their effects will mostly be unique and very widely varying. I might reverse this in the future if I find a lot of overlap, but I don't see it happening.

Because I'm just learning ogre and I don't have a very easy way to do input parsing (I could just take keypresses or put some crappy GUI widgets up, but that's a hassle since I'm still shaky around ogre), I'm also writing a pseudo-battle-state-machine by which to test the interplay of abilities. It feels almost silly to be saying this since I can't really illustrate it, but I feel it necessary to report on my actions.

Here's a screenshot. It doesn't show much, because there's not much to show yet. Yes, that is the default ogre robot mesh. I've injected my own texture into a material and made the randomly generating tile map thing you see there. What's most important is that it illustrates how exploration will be tile-based, and the camera will be third-person at an angle (I totally didn't gank this from Azure Dreams. Really.)

(Also I didn't show the screenshot directly because I didn't want anyone jumping to it immediately and going WTF THIS SUCKS OMG. Read the post, goobers. And keep in mind I've just started the project.)