Development Log: January Engine - Week 2

Well, not much appears to have been done on the surface, because I spent the majority of the week cleaning code and making it smoother.

And the cards are shaped like cards.

Now, the enemy can do everything the player can do, and uses the same functions.  A simple Boolean keeps track of whether it's the player's turn or not.

I also created a separate message box (in the bottom-right) for most text.  The text above the health of the player and enemy are there mostly to show what their current condition is (stunned, confused, etc.).

I think some of the messages still go unseen because I don't have enough timers to wait between messages, so there still needs a bit of work to be done in figuring out exactly where the timers are needed.

I have also capped each character's health (at 10 for the test), so neither the player nor the enemy can heal above their max.

At the moment, the enemy chooses a card at random, which can result in the enemy doing some very silly moves, so eventually I'll have to come up with some AI for the enemy so they don't act so dumb.  They should act as if they have a five-card hand as well, and pick the best card for their situation.

The battle ends when one character loses their health, but since there is no overworld to go back to, it simply ends, and erases everything after a second.  I need to add a pretty win statement in the message box, but at the moment, have no fear when the screen goes away; it's not broken.

I currently have the win/loss check on ENTER_FRAME, but I think there ought to be a better way to do it, such as only when a character takes damage, but the win condition check is in Main, not in the Battle class itself, so things might get a little convoluted for a while.

I am finding I have to reference strings multiple times, and that always makes me a bit uncomfortable.  Often, a case will throw out an error because of a typo or change in vocabulary that I did not completely implement.

The "Confused" condition adds a secondary case (since if you're confused, either your move doesn't work or affects the opposite of the target), so I'm thinking of getting rid of it, just to simplify things a ton.  Besides, while confusing the enemy is fun, being confused is not, and I want all player actions to be playable by the enemy as well.

I've also added some code to make sure the player doesn't have duplicate cards (an odd recursive check ensures that the index of the card in the deck array is not the same as any other card in hand).

I think I had a non-recursive function originally, which lowered the odds of having duplicate cards, but did not wholly take care of the problem.  Now there should be no duplicates.  (The player may have more than one of the same type of card, because there is often more than one of each card in the deck, but since the player only has one Confuse card, for instance, the player should never get two of them in hand).

I think I may still have an error or two in the logic, because being stunned appears to last way too long (unless the enemy is stunning me multiple times, and the output is not particularly clear).  I have an int that keeps track of how many turns a character has been in a condition which -=1 each turn.

Man, I feel like I need to write daily notes, rather than summing up a week, because I forget what I've done since last week.

PLAY WEEK 2 HERE.