Minions For The Master

 Hello there!


This week we made the decision to change the name of our worshipers to minions.  We did this because it feels more appropriate since we are on the evil side and have the ability to buy and sell them.  



I worked all week to get our minions the ability to not only power up the player, but the towers as well.  There are three kinds of minions and they each give a special buff to the player's AOE attack and the tower's projectiles!  These buffs transfer into debuffs on the enemies.  The minions also grant damage to the player's attacks, as well as damage, range, and attack speed to the towers.



Getting the minions to update the stats in real time proved to be a challenge.  I thought at first that I'd want to do it as a tick, but later decided that since I already had a delegate for gaining or losing a minion, I could alter and use that to send the information I needed when I needed it instead of wasting ticks.  I opted to transfer the stacks of the buffs inside of a single int.  I used the ones, tens, and hundreds values to each represent a different stack.  All it takes is a small conversion formula using modulo to change it into three separate values as we transfer it to the projectiles and AOE attack.



I managed to build the tower's stats and got them to accurately change the way we wanted with each minion, however, implementing those stats was a whole other story.  I've been writing all my code in C++ and the towers are built in blueprint, so I had to work with my teammate Giga to figure out where the stats could be implemented.



By the end of the week, it was working like a charm!  Now to get the enemy health to scale with the wave number so we don't just one-shot them every time!



Thanks for tuning in and make sure you come back again next week,

Corbin Mein

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