Author: Corey Bell Wright

Part 1: The Problem

After getting caught up with the project and implementing the initial melee weapon system, the next major challenge was building our several core gameplay systems from scratch. These included setting up a flexible weapon system, creating a way to track and handle player as well as enemy health, and beginning to establish key player-facing UI elements like health bars, gold counters, and relic slows. 

Without these systems in place, the game lacked critical functionality needed for testing combat, progression, and overall player feedback. It was important to get these working early to give the team a solid gameplay foundation to iterate and improve on.

Part 2: The Solution

I started by building out a modular weapon system, creating a base weapon class and then subclassing it for melee-specific weapons. After that, I shifted focus to the health system. I fixed and expanded the existing health component to properly handle damage from both players and enemy skeletons, ensuring that actors could take damage.

To make testing easier, I created a new player HUD that displays health, gold, relic slots, and the player's Infamy Title. The Infamy system itself was also implemented, allowing players to earn different titles based on their Infamy points. I included debug tools to quickly deal damage to the player or add Infamy points making it easier for the team to test these new features. I also laid the foundation to expand the Infamy system as this will be our scaling difficulty system.

These changes created a stronger gameplay loop and allowed fore testing of both combat mechanics and health progression, improving the overall experience for both the team and future players.