Battlegrid Update 2 - Interruptions

Getting back into the swing of regular updates might take a bit to get used to, but here we are for our second consecutive week. Most of this week ended up being spent on getting action interrupts to function properly, which was a bit more involved than one might expect. The primary roadblocks that came with the system were as follows: Actions had to be able to stop no matter what was currently happening in them, each effect needed to be able to be interrupted separately from one another, interrupted effects needed to have their own cleanup logic to make sure that they ended in stable states, effects needed to be able to specify when they are able to be interrupted and when they aren't, and actions needed to be able to handle what happens when some of the current effects can be interrupted but others cannot.

Mostly, dealing with these requirements meant setting up a bunch of extra structure within my action system. Actions can specify move tags to be set or removed on an interrupt, as well as effects to trigger. Each effect type now specifies what happens when they are interrupted, and visual effects on the grid can now be cut short if needed. Movements that have been queued now have priority values attached to them, and I can force clear all movements of below a certain priority when needed.  This allows me to tell actors to stop moving as part of an action while not getting in the way of things like queued knockback or vital return movements in the event of well timed interrupts, like so:

It might be hard to tell what's happening here with my temp art, but the first step-sword attack executes as normal, but the second is hit by an enemy attack after advancing into enemy territory, but before their slash comes out. The interrupt system tells the player to stop all actions and immediately queue up a movement to return them to their starting point, while removing the tags that allow them to enter the enemy tiles during the action. With the new functionality of the movement priority system, if the enemy's attack had a knockback effect on it, the knockback movement would be applied immediately after the player finishes moving back to their starting tile.

Besides the interrupts, I did begin work setting up architecture for the cards themselves, but there's not really anything I can show visually on that front yet. Now, I was going to discuss my design thoughts on the cards and deckbuilding system as a whole, but a website glitch deleted the writeup I made, so I no longer have the time to do that at the moment. That will come with next week instead, where hopefully I will have the card system architecture figured out and maybe even a basic version of the draw phase up and running.

​See you next time.