Development Log: January Engine - Week 1

I have now created a simple card-based battle system.  The pretty pictures and epic music score comes later.  Also, the descriptions on the cards word-wrapping.  Details, details.

And the cards should probably be card-shaped.

Anyway, the player is given a starter deck of forty cards, and is dealt a new hand of five random cards every turn.  The player can choose among them what to play simply by clicking on them.  The odds of drawing some cards are very high (a card dealing two damage is 3/10) and others are very low (Confuse is 1/40).

I have currently created the most basic variety of RPG moves:

Simple damage

Heal self

Confuse

Stun

Block

All of these work (I think), except that Stun is a tad buggy (the enemy stays stunned unless you Confuse or Block).

Also, Block may appear to be ineffective, but Block only blocks one damage point, so if the enemy deals two or three damage, the player still takes some damage (normal damage - 1 for blocking).  Only if the enemy deals one damage does the player completely block the attack.

Sometimes you can't see what's blocking you.

(I'm sure that the system is horribly imbalanced and doesn't give particularly good feedback, but that doesn't matter at the moment.  Details, details.)

The enemy is also given a deck of cards and chooses randomly among them.  However, for this simple battle, the enemy can only do direct damage.  I will later add the same functions for the enemy (or clean my code and make the player and enemy functions one and the same).

Also, the player cannot see the card the enemy has chosen, and at present I am not sure if I want the player to actually see it, or just feel its effect.  I may play with that idea and decide what is best.

There is currently no win condition, and both the player and the enemy's health can go below zero, and it is next on my agenda to make victory and loss conditions.

As for the work done, I found it a small challenge getting back into the swing of coding AS3.  While I began with reservations about how much I would remember, much of it came back to me quickly.  Code is just like learning a foreign language:  when you have to use it after you've forgotten it, you remember more than you think you do.

English on the left, AS3 on the right.

But for problems with coding:

I am always annoyed at adding event listeners, because the function you put in as a parameter cannot have its own parameters (or if it can, I am not sure how to do it).

To get over this, I created a class called Battle which acts as a manager for the battle, not only holding various functions such as dealing cards, etc, but also holding variables which could not otherwise be passed.

The creation of timers to delay messages were similarly handled.

I've considered recreating my own versions of these built-in functions to fix that, but at the moment I'll take the path of least resistance and just walk around the mountain, rather than climb up it.  It may become necessary in the future to do so, but for the moment, as long as I am getting basic functionality, I'll worry about cleaning my code later.

PLAY WEEK 1 HERE.

(If the screen is magically green when you try to play, just refresh and that should fix it.  I think it's a Google Chrome bug but I'm not sure.  Other browsers may or may not have this problem.)