Merry xmas everyone!  With this week being xmas week I'm not sure I'll get a chance to do too much development, but if the option comes up I'd like to focus on the challenge action (as we discussed earlier in this post).  Now that we have the tags in a good place we can use those tag descriptions as part of our seed data for the challenge generative AI.

As a quick refresher, the "challenge" action is an action available to any unit who can speak (i.e. hasn't been silenced) to cheer on an ally or confront an enemy.  The involved player unit will choose a dialog option, which will result in a related increase or decrease in stats.  The challenge action is only available when the target unit has endured a "key event", such as an ally getting knocked out or killed.  Once a unit has experienced a "key event", either an ally or enemy can target them with a Challenge action and engage in the dialog - if it's an enemy unit the target will get a debuff, if it's an ally they'll get a boon.

The tricky part will be the enemy AI - if an enemy unit decides to challenge a player unit, it requires player input.  To date the enemy turn has been fairly automated, so we'll have to change that flow up a bit so that we can effectively "pause" the enemy AI flow while it waits for player input (which will be at the end of a bunch of queued animation view actions) and then resume once a choice is made.

Of course, we're also using generative AI for the dialog, so we'll have to write that integration.  That's the part I'm pretty good at, due to experience from my day job, so I don't expect that to take much effort :)

• rework challenge action to work in new event-based system
  • player initiated: select one of two generated options, enemy/ally responds, tag applied
  • enemy initiated to player: enemy says a phrase, player selects one of the options
  • UI required to show, make selection
  • show response
  • apply tag

Some bonus work on continuing where I left off with tags, namely making temporary tags actually temporary.  See you at the end of the week!