Spellcasting, Auras, and Combat

A preview of some of the new features implemented.

Many different features have been worked on for the past few weeks, including a new model yet to be finished, but so far the above video gives a good idea of what is currently implemented in the game. The spells "Teleport", "Fireball", and "Summon Skeleton Minion" are demonstrated along with melee fighting, auras, and basic AI support.

The haste aura active on a warrior, surrounded by the dead bodies of both his minions and enemy monsters.

My plan now is to focus on traveling to different maps, dynamic map generation (think Diablo 1), and implementing more spells. Spell casting, now that the foundation is implemented, is pretty fast to add spells for. A typical spell written is around 50 lines of code. Auras are even less, with about 30 lines of code per aura. I've also been playing around with formulas for each spells.

The image used to texture the haste aura model (a simple textured plane with a 360 degree rotation animation rendered using an isometric perspective).

In the above video, you can see the "Haste Aura", which spreads to all allies within 15 meters and provides a certain percent faster run speed based on a given formula. The formula itself is,

Running Speed Multiplier = 1 + 0.2 * LOG(spell_level+1) + 0.003 * spell_level

The logarithm is used to give the first 5-10 levels a sharp jump in speed increase, while the linear part provides a more constant increase in speed at higher levels (10+). I used Excel to give me an idea of the percent increases and tweaked the constant in front of the logarithm and the constant for the linear function to get the values I was happiest with.

A chart made in Excel showing how the multiplier for speed changes with level (from spell level 1 to spell level 40, and from a multiplier of ~5% to ~45%).

As can be see in the above graph, the speed multiplier has a small jump at the beginning before evening out.

A work in progress of a new model for the game.

Hopefully in my next post I can show a new model I've been working on. I'm going to probably add it as both a monster and a "form" or transformation that the player unit can become. Right now the difficulty is in texturing the model. It's very hard to do right, especially with low resolution and issues of low contrast making everything blur together. One of the tricks I applied to the bird model from earlier is to make the brightness of the model increase as it goes higher up the body, so that the head stands out the most (in the above picture, you can see this to some degree in the light chest and face area). Still a lot of work to do tweaking it and also getting the animations for it (it is rigged at least). Until next time!