Some design considerations and features

For this game, I want a simple control scheme that is playable with one-hand. It should be playable with either using a mouse only, using a keyboard only, or using a controller. The best way to accomplish this, in my opinion, is to keep the number of buttons low. Therefore, for gameplay, there will only be 2 buttons, an “Affirmative” button, and a “Back” button + directional controls - WASD/arrow keys on the keyboard, the cursor with a mouse. This doesn’t include things like menu keys or camera controls.

The “Affirmative” button does what you expect and the “Back” button “undoes” an action. For example, during combat, you can use it to undo movement if you misclicked or found a better position; or having second thoughts after having picked an ability, to “undo” that and select another ability:

Note that however, once you have “committed”, that is, actually used an ability on the target, you can no longer undo. For the obvious reasons - you shouldn’t have unlimited tries in case an ability missed, failed, or didn’t roll as high as damage as you wanted.

Another new feature is the “Survey Mode”: in this mode, if you mouse over a unit, you are shown their movement range and tiles that they can attack. (Blue - move range, Red - attackable range). What I plan to do in the future is that when you click on a unit in this mode, it will bring up a more detailed unit info screen that shows that unit’s capabilities.

The “Survey Mode” can be accessed by using the “Back” button when you don’t have an ability selected nor is a move undo possible. It can be exited by using the “Back” button again or by using the “Affirmative” button on the unit that is currently taking their turn.

An alternative design is to merge the “Survey Mode” functionality with regular combat and not have a separate mode. The problem is that there is a potential ambiguity: when you hover over a unit that is within your movement range, should the game stop displaying your movement range and display that units range instead? If that is so, then when you un-hover that unit, the game will display your movement range again instead of that units. I find this flickering annoying.

Another consideration is for consistency when the unit is grabbed/grabbing. When the grab selection menu is on, the Directional keys (think keyboard and not mouse)  will no longer be controlling which tile to select, but instead controls which grab option to pick. So the “Back” button is necessary to exit this grab selection menu and go back into surveying the battlefield. With a separate mode, then this control setup is the same regardless of whether the unit is a grab.

TECHNICAL STUFF BELOW:

Earlier this week, I was considering on how to implement save/load functionalities and stuff like how to automatically generate sliders that hooks to an object to tweek it’s values. This requires reflection - “the ability of a process to examine, introspect, and modify its own structure and behavior.” (wiki) But unfortunately, this is not a feature that is supported by C++, the programming language of choice for this game. So I had to hand implement this feature:

The ITERABLE_FIELDS macro hides a lot of ugliness, but the end result is fairly reasonable, at least in my opinion anyways.

END OF TECHNICAL STUFF

The next feature I am going to add is text bubbles, which will be displayed above a unit when they react to something. It’s something I felt that was missing in HRT compared to HR, and that it can add a lot of flavor to the game.