I didn't get a lot of dev time this week with xmas events coming to a head, but I got a few hours of solid progress.

This week I focused on the "tag" system.  A tag is an adjective that applies to a unit that may or may not provide increases or decreases to stats or other calculations.  To start with I just added a positive and negative tag to every stat (so about 20 of them) and I'm randomly choosing one positive and one negative at game start for each unit.

I also added a terrain-based tag, so when your unit enters a "bush" terrain type they get a poison tag.  That tag has a "end of turn" effect associated with it which causes the unit to lose 10% of their max HP at the end of each turn.

The tag system design was pretty fun; I coded it in such a way that each tag can have zero or more "modifiers".  Each modifier has a "Target" associated with it, such as MaxHP, MaxAP, Might, Fortitude, etc.  Then, when I need to reference a unit's stats, I query all tags' modifiers for that stat's target and I'm able to get a modified value.

I've also given tag instances a "duration" and "speed" so that they can eventually go away (i.e. maybe you stay poisoned for 3 rounds).  I have yet to actually incorporate them into the TurnManager though, that'll be a problem for future me.

I also had to refactor the "move" logic from the animation controller into the core game engine, now that the core game actually cares about moving into individual tiles.  It does make the unit movement slightly more choppy, but it allows us to apply per-tile effects (i.e. maybe there's a trap on a tile that prevents further movement?)

My goal is to design a positive and negative tag for each number-based calculation.  While I've only done the base stats for now, we can also look at things like attack range, attack action point cost (maybe you can dual wield!), height (float/burrow), attack accuracy, attack evade, damage, damage range... and that's just the attack action!

As for next week... one thing that's come up is being able to visualize where an action puts you in the future turn order, similar to final fantasy tactics when you're plotting when to take an action.  I also want to get back to the Challenge action now that the tags are back in place, as that's a differentiating feature of the game and want to make sure it works great.

Have a merry xmas everyone!