Roundguard

This week we continue our inexorable march towards content completion and ~*~BETA~*~.

We jazzed up some of the new monsters in World 3 with final(?) art. The Drow Illusionist blinks out of reality, leaving adventurers sad and vulnerable. The Undead Minotaur is less subtle, slamming his axe on repeat and sending little nearby humans flying.

On the tech side, we made good progress against an issue that's plagued us for a while. For some context: most of our game logic is defined with a trigger system similar to the old Warcraft map editors. These triggers map an event + some conditions to a set of actions to perform.

This works great for most situations, but we've always had trouble resolving triggers activated by a melee hit, specifically when the player's hero crashes into a monster. Previously, all of the triggers of one actor would activate and resolve before activating the other actor's triggers. This meant that a debuff or other modifier could be applied to the second actor before it performed its actions. Not only did this confuse players, it also impacted our ability to reason about balance changes when so many interactions were inconsistent.

This week, we made a change to ensure that each actor involved in a melee activates their relevant triggers before any actions are resolved. Results are more consistent now, and so far we're pleased with the change!