Hey everybody!  (my kids have started watching The Simpsons again ;)  Here's what I got accomplished this week!

• I added a "tile cursor" to show what tile is being selected; I found this was necessary when I accidentally moved the selection away from the "in range" tiles, you get lost as to where you are and it's difficult to get back.  Now that there's a floating gold cursor it's easier to see
• Along the same lines, I modified the camera to follow the selected tile instead of being fixed on the current unit.  This helps when the route selected is quite far away from the current unit.  
  • After the first attempt when I was just "snapping" the camera to the tile's position I switched to a "damp" transition to have the camera accelerate towards the selected tile.  This gives a much more smooth appearance to the visuals
• I'm calculating the "jump stat" for a unit based on their agility, so higher-agility units will be able to jump higher / fall further.  With a base value of "1", we add 1/3rd of the agility.  There will also be opportunities for tags to modify this value in the future (i.e. frogs might have a "hoppy" tag that increases their jump by 1)
• With the jump stat, there were some changes to the pathfinding algorithm to account for if a unit can jump or fall to a neighbouring tile.  If the fall distance was greater than their jump stat, we apply a damage penalty if the unit decides to take that route of 10% of their max HP per excessive height
  • In the future I'll have to modify this to take "soft landings" into account; maybe jumping into a lake or river doesn't damage as much / at all
• Added a bit of a jump/fall animation where we do more of a hop than a simple move when the absolute height difference is >= 1
  • Taking advantage of our event/view action system this was quite easy; I just added two new view actions (jump and fall) and modified the animation queue controller to enqueue one of those towards the next tile as needed.
  • This view action system also enabled me to show fall damage quite easily; if we know there's going to be fall damage (and we do thanks to the path node system from the pathfinding algorithm) we just enqueue a "show damage" view action right after the fall animation

Overall I'm pretty happy with where things ended up this week, and I think I'm ready to move on from the tile height feature.  A few things on my radar for next week:

• Going through my game design notes I realized I haven't really been working on any of the things that will make Rootless unique; I've been mostly just working on standard tactical RPG features.  Those are important, of course, but it's starting to feel less like I'm working on Rootless and more like I'm working on a generic game system.  I might try to prioritize some specific features like the tag system or Challenge action next
• I'm still not happy with the map design.  One of my friends pointed out that the movement at the beginning is quite jerky with the whole left-right-left-right thing, and I agree.  It just happens to be a side effect of the diagonal paths that the units start on, but it's still weird.  I had two thoughts:
  • I could rotate the whole map 45 degrees so that the diagonal routes from the corners would actually be straight routes from the sides
  • I could modify the move view action routine so that movements between tiles of the same type at the same height could just meld together (making it a longer diagonal move instead of a square-by-square thing)
• I also didn't do much about the units getting obscured by the taller tiles on the map.  I may either just modify the tile heights along the riverbank (easy fix) or actually implement some visual obstruction logic (much more difficult, but likely needed eventually)
• I'm also getting concerned that some of my view classes are getting too big... I have a BattleController that handles a bit too much.  Might spend some time cleaning some of that up to avoid issues later.

We're also getting into the holiday season, so opportunities to work on Rootless will likely decrease.  In any case, I'll keep y'all updated!  Have a good weekend!