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Reworking the skill trees

Slimegeon
A downloadable game

Anthony Palermo - 5/18/2023

I decided to make the skill trees have a uniform shape last week, and made adjustments to all the skill trees to make certain they looked the same and functioned the same. I had a few things in the Beastiary pages that needed minor adjustments, such as some text that wasn't wrapping around and ended up going of the screen in the necromancer page.

The skeleton skill tree was one that I had the easiest time implementing, but also took the longest to implement. The reason it took so long was due to our group working on fixing an extremely overpowered ability the skeleton had. While dashing, if the player tried to use the basic attack, the attack would shoot three arrows. This was intentional, but would one hit kill most enemies and worked with the bomb and lightning arrows. So we decided to both lock the ability behind the skeleton skill tree, and split it further into a skill called Double Shot which allows the skeleton to shoot two arrows after holding the dash button down and then another skill that changes Double Shot into Triple Shot.

A large portion of the time I spent working on the skill trees actually involved me reading through the code and blueprints of the associated enemies. I had very little work done on the enemy units in our game as the front-end UI developer on the team and thus had to find where in  the code to modify the damage the player dealt when possessing enemies, along with any other stat changes and cost reductions for abilities. For some of the skills and enemies, I had to put the code within the projectiles code rather than the enemy themselves, which mostly applied to the Necromancer's lighting projectiles.
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