Greetings. I’m back from GDC and ready to get back to the grindstone. GDC was a great learning experience, both for the technical and business tracks and the other great indie devs that I got a chance to meet. So, hopefully a little wiser, he’s the long promised combat update! Here’s a video of the raw engine in action:

I’m afraid we went a little overboard on combat. We both have strong fighting game backgrounds, so we didn’t want units just pound away at each other until one fell over. So here are the broad strokes of what we’ve done.

Combat Abilities!

Every unit has a unique set of combat abilities.  The goblins have two abilities the “swing with your mace” ability and the “block with your shield” ability.  The footmen have four abilities, the three different sword swipes and a parry ability.  (these are just placeholder abilities we’re using for now to test the engine.)  Every ability has the following properties:

  • Execution phase: The amount of time it takes from the start of the move to the point at which the ability activates.  For a sword swing, the execution time is the time it takes to wind up and swing the sword.  For simple combat abilities, this will always be less than a second, but for a spell it may be a few seconds while the spell is being cast.
  • Active phase: The period after the execution time when the attack is active.  For a melee strike you can think of this as instantaneous, but a channeled spell might have a long active phase.
  • Recovery phase:  A period of time after the move when the unit is unable to perform any other action.  For a sword swing, the recovery time is the time it takes the footman to reset his sword to the ready stance.  Again, for simple combat abilities, this is less than a second, but it matters.
  • Cooldown: The amount of time before the ability can be executed again.  For instance, maybe a powerful spell can only be cast once every 60 seconds.

How Combat Works

If you know fighting games, then you probably know how this is going to play out.  During combat, units are completely vulnerable during their execution time and recovery time.  Look closely and you can see guys getting hit while they’re winding up to do an attack — they are being hit out of their execution phase.

This means speed matters!  A series of fast attacks can overwhelm an enemy by interrupting a greater percentage of his attacks.  So you’ll have to factor in your units’ attack speed before sending them into combat.

So there’s a look at the raw combat engine.  There’s still lots to do and bugs to fix, but this is a pretty significant milestone in getting a base implementation of the game’s major systems: harvesting, building, crafting, and combat.