Ripping out Brains, Madness and Fear

Feels like pretty soon I'll have all the major systems in place and all the foreseeable refactors taken care of. I'm looking forward to moving into a long phase of just tightening bolts and creating content.

Anyway, on another post on the subreddit a few months ago, I saw some devs describing that they used an AI controller class that was separate from the monster class to move those entities around. This really struck me, and I wish I had originally implemented my game in this way. Instead, I had a monster class derived from a general "Agent" class (of which the player character class was also derived) with all of the AI methods baked in. This was proving to be a problem when I wanted to be able to use the same AI code for something other than moving a monster around. Specifically, I wanted to do things like:

- give the player an auto-explore command

- have the player temporarily lose control of their character when under the influence of certain magic

- allow the character to be controlled by AI for debugging purposes

So this week I set about ripping all the AI code out of the monster class to put it inside a separate "brain" class. I had to swim through a sea of compiler errors as I converted every "do_something()" into "body.do_something()", but I eventually go through it. Then I gave the player a brain that can temporarily take over at certain times.

The player can now be the target of a fear spell that will force the player to flee from a scary enemy. They can also be the subject of a "cause madness" spell that makes the player temporarily insane and attack other nearby agents. This spell can be very harmful if the player has any allied followers.

I also created the "axe of fury". This is a fairly powerful melee weapon that, as a side effect, has a 17% chance to cause the user to go mad for 5-11 turns after any substantial hit. So it's a great weapon to have when the odds are already in your favour, but not what you want when you need to approach a battle with caution.

Some other ideas for the future:

- An enemy that can hypnotize the player, causing the player to follow them back into a small cave where a stronger enemy waits in ambush.

- NPCs that can be hired to guide the player to some location. This would put the player on autopilot while they follow the guide.