Spell Targets, Story Boards and Level Progressions

The UI refactoring wended it's way on to a refactoring of spell targeting. Since inception spell targets have been represented in combat intentions and actions as a single integer, which is interpreted differently by the resolution code depending on the target type of the spell. Pretty ugly.

That's been updated in good OO fashion to be represented using the SpellTarget interface. Actors, Tiles and Groups are examples of implementing classes. This was a bit enough refactor to merit a development item on it's own, but at least it's down now.

After that I took a diversion into some fun stuff. Some classes and races have been renamed, in the quest for better flavour. Yeti to Mirka, Salamander to Hynobi, Troll to Neotroll. Warriors are now Berserkers, Thiefs and now Burglars. The latter two also do a better job of highlighting my intentions for the roles of those classes as opposed to the Hero and Knave.

Some more fun stuff was redesigning the introduction. The game launches straight to the menu now, and starting a new game walks through a storyboard images (some still placeholders) and text. Here's the first:

Finally, I've moved on to level ability progressions. Each character class will have a progression of level abilities that the character is granted at each level up, 1 to 20. I'm working on the editor and data layer for this at the moment, but the real work will be defining and implementing these abilities. As usual, the scope of work is something like

Data Model < Game System < CRUD < Content

So that's where we are. I'm still aiming for a June/July checkpoint release, and to keep the occasional blog post coming.