This update brought two big things.
The first is that the upper route of arcade mode world 3 got its final route. The player can now trek across the world. The nodes shouldn’t be considered done. They need a lot of balance, but we have something on screen now. The worlds take a lot of effort to make. Making 25ish unique nodes, each with an alternate version takes around a hundred hours, and we have three world sets of that.
We still have so much work to do in arcade mode, but it’s great to finally have the route in.
The second is that Fallen Down has a problem. Lenette explains it best.
Cards explain their own rules well enough, but the final result of playing a card is very difficult to know. If a target has vulnerability, block, & armor with 3 durability, and stagger, how much damage will smite do? To fix this, I’ve added damage predictions. It’s a little UI piece over the heads of enemies before you attack. How does it work?
Technically, Fallen Down is very complex. The card engine code to resolve attacks is thousands of lines of code, with callbacks leading to and fro across the code. The concept of unresistable armor damage like Wreck does is around 200 lines of code by itself
Attacks start and go across stages. During any stage, events will be raised and resolved.
Pretty easy to understand and follow, right?
Many effects have a limited number of times they can be used. To see how much damage something is going to do without using up the effects or damaging armor, we need to be able to simulate an attack. There are many status effects, traits, and card effects that need to be able to look at a given situation and make a prediction about how much damage they will add or remove.
Luckily, most things that need to make a prediction fall into a pattern. They need to know who is attacking, who is being attacked, and they can resolve the internal logic from there. Better yet, the really complicated things like Rosega’s Guardian trait don’t need this, because AI doesn’t show predictions. As a result, I only had to change about 30ish classes instead of the possible 90ish.