Ability Subroutines

Last week's ability experiment was fun, but I had some concerns about it being too confusing.

So I doubled down on that! I've added "subroutines", which allow abilities to be modified on the fly.

I also added ammo for some abilities as a balancing mechanism, and a minimal ability heads up display.

Subroutines

Last week's Spellcasting 3.0 prototyped a system where:

1. You assign perks to several different abilities.
2. Each ability can be "Fired" by clicking the mouse or pressing a button (or some game event happening, like taking damage or dying).
3. When an ability Fires, it "executes" all the perks assigned to it; for example, Bullet, Big Shot would shoot a bullet that's been made bigger.

I liked it, but once an ability is configured, it was a bit too same-y?

With only a couple ability slots, you have limited options to handle different scenarios - like needing to get to a higher place, hit an enemy around a corner, extinguish yourself if you're burning to death, etc.

So I'm trying out a special "Subroutine" ability, which doesn't ever itself Fire, but can be toggled into an Active state - and when it's Active, its perks are automatically applied to every ability that Fires:

It ends up feeling a bit like weapon-mods you can turn on and off?¹ I like it, but I think this concept needs both more incentive to be used (vs putting all the perks in the original ability) and a reason to not always be activated.

And probably it also needs a better name than "Subroutine" too - that will only make sense to programmers.

HUD

With Subroutines in the mix, it was hard to see what keys do what, so I added a new "ability heads up display" (HUD):

And as you saw above, you can now also save and restore your ability loadout via the existing loadout editing interface. Your loadout is now also restored when you respawn, which makes it less annoying to experiment with the more dangerous perks.

Of course, acquiring perks or abilities will require a bit more effort during real gameplay; this editing interface is just a placeholder for experimenting.

Balancing with Ammunition

"Balancing" refers to a game's designers making sure no tactic is so strong that it makes the game unfun (and making sure that all intended tactics are viable at least some of the time).

That's tricky when abilities are built by players themselves! I don't want simple combinations of perks to be trivially game-breaking, but I do want there to be some combinations that are game-breaking some of the time. ²

That mostly comes down to individual perk designs, but whatever I do, some perks - like the new Multishot ("fire N copies of the last projectile") - will always be more powerful than others. To offset that I added "ammunition": ³

The addition of ammo means the extra damage output that Multishot gives is balanced somewhat by needing to reload the ability sooner - which will matter more when using a gun with a smaller magazine size.

It's a work in progress - when you stop firing, your ability is automatically reloaded, whereas you'd expect to only need to reload if your magazine is empty.

Playable web build‎

There's still no way to acquire perks by actually playing the game (... oops) so:

1. Click the button on the top left to open the placeholder loadout editor, then:
2. Click the "Starter Loadout" button to load up some perks and abilities.
3. Edit abilities to your heart's content.
4. Collapse the loadout editor by clicking the ▼ arrow.
5. Press the button or mouse key to fire the ability (and hopefully not kill yourself).