Effect systems, revisited

This last week I’ve been spending my free time working on the effect system, again… I remembered that I have the need to parameterize effects (for example, cast effects must take parameters like the target position or the cast time), and for that I had to refactor the whole thing yet again…

Good news: I didn’t really use it yet for real… Bad news: I even didn’t had the occasion to use it!

Anyway, I’ve been working on game code for real, which means that I finally can control Grey’s abilities, and the first one is the life-shape ritual… I decided to go for a “common” effect that I can parameterize.

First, select the target position (currently it doesn’t account for range and line-of-sight):

Then, the effect starts (it counts as casting time):

Some lights and 3d sprites moving, and then I spawn the creature (normal spawn methods) and apply a “spherify” shader, which converts any mesh to a blob, and lerps between that shape and the normal one, depending on a parameter, that gets animated by the effect:

Don’t have tools to record video here to show it in movement, but since I’m not 100% happy with the spell effect, it’s probably better that way…

Working on spell effects is always tricky… you’re never 100% happy (because you’re too close), and you have one million ideas on how to improve it, but when you try them in practice, it doesn’t look so great anymore… I also lost the hot-reload of effects for some reason (need to find that bug out), which doesn’t help (working on my laptop which is very slow compared to my normal development machine, but hey, I’m on vacation!)

Anyway, it’s good starting to see the pieces of actual game clicking… there’s one million things remaining to be done, but the game itself is finally moving forward, which is great, especially because motivation has been running low lately (and a lot of game ideas have been jumping around in my head!)… I wish I could make my living out of this!