Development Day 7: Learning Spells

When I got home from work this evening, I calculated that I will have to complete a feature on the list from yesterday about every 3 hours and 15 minute in order to get them done on time.  That's if I leave out sleep, which might not be a good idea.  At this point, about six and a half hours later, I'm finished with two of the features (Runes and Spell Learning), which is about on the right track!

Runes aren't something that you can directly see in the game yet, but behind the scenes every spell is now created from three different runes - one that determines how the spell is targeted, one that determines the area the spell will affect, and one that determines the effect of the spell.  As a result, the existing spells in the game have been slightly rebalanced.  Hopefully, I'll finish the feature which allows you the player to create new spells from runes yourself - it should work just as well as the existing spells.

Spell Learning is much more immediately exciting.  You don't start knowing all the spells in the game anymore, but have to learn spells from the spellrunes scattered about the dungeon - the purple circles with the vertical line.  On walking onto one, you will immediately learn the spell it grants, and be able to cast it on your next turn.  I had to chase a fairly elusive bug on this one - it was giving you duplicate spells because it wasn't recognizing that you knew them already, which I eventually traced down to a comparison-by-reference error.

Next up, I'll work on Rune Identification - as you learn more spells, you will start to pick up one the runes that make up those spells.  Pick up enough runes, and you will be able to create spells of your own....