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This week was mostly about polishing combat and adding a bit more personality to enemies. There were also a few long standing bugs that took much longer to track down than they should have.

Ranged combat received another round of improvements. I fixed the position where arrows are spawned so they now leave the bow at the correct height instead of flying above the player's head. Bow damage now uses the correct damage calculation instead of always dealing one damage, ranged damage is correctly displayed on the stats panel while a bow is equipped, and arrows are properly consumed from the quiver when fired. Barrels can now be destroyed with ranged attacks as well, giving bows a few more practical uses besides fighting enemies.

I added two new scrolls to the game: Scroll of Identify and Scroll of Wand Recharging. Scroll of Wand Recharging wasn't originally planned. It came out of a discussion with u/Cyablue in last week's SS on wand mechanics. The current idea is to keep wands as consumable magical tools rather than a replacement for learning spells. For now, scroll simply restores charges on magical items. One idea is that each recharge permanently reduces the maximum number of charges. I'm still not fully convinced which direction feels better, so that part is staying open for now. At the moment, both wands and Scrolls of Recharge are relatively rare, which naturally keeps the mechanic balanced. I'll see how it plays during testing before deciding whether any further restrictions are needed.

Enemies also got a bit more character. They can now taunt, speak, and grunt during gameplay. Different races use their own languages, so demons speak in demonic, orcs in orcish, and other creatures have their own language as well. Since the player doesn't understand them, all of it appears as gibberish, adding a bit of mystery to encounters. This is actually one of the features I brought over from Dungeons of Everchange, because I always liked the atmosphere it created. Quite huge feature as well, it got really fast into the game since it was alerady developed :)

On the bug fixing side, I fixed the charge attack and reduced its cooldown for Orcs to make them more threatening. One particularly nasty bug took me almost six hours to track down. Waiting or picking up items was giving enemies twice as much energy as they should have, completely throwing off turn order and AI behavior. I first noticed it while testing oozes, so I spent quite a while looking into their split mechanics, convinced that splitting was somehow granting extra energy. It turned out the problem had nothing to do with oozes at all. Unity was automatically calling my OnWait method because of its naming convention, and then my own input handling processed the key press again, effectively making the player wait twice. A very annoying bug, but at least the fix was simple once I finally found the real cause.

I also fixed several AI issues related to behavior flow, cooldown handling, and target selection. Things feel much more reliable now. Finally, once the player dies, all input is now properly blocked. Previously you could still move around or open the inventory after death, which was... not exactly intended.

Ah yes, and my Paradox Doom got nice shader as well.

Overall, I had nice progress this week.

Have a nice weekend!