1. Inside Abilities Daniel Kline and Lauren McHugh

4. Table of Contents 1.What are Abilities? 2.Architecture 3.Postmortem

5. What is Darkspore?

6. Darkspore Video

7. What Are Abilities?

8. Games with lots and lots of different "attacks" and "spells" and "buffs".

9. Every Interaction in World of Warcraft is an Ability.

10. But… Abilities are Ubiquitous

11. What's the most basic ability?

13. Fireball Video

14. Target Validation Warmup Animation Lag Detection Cast Animation Cooldown Power/Mana Costs Projectile Creation "Muzzle" Effects Release Animation What Does a Fireball Do? Caster Projectile Projectile Targeting Projectile Locomotion Impact Damage Impact and Hit Effects Explosion Targeting Explosion Damage Explosion Impact Explosion Hit Effects

15. This is our simple example!

16. Our Challenge

17. How do you make 100 different Fireballs?

18. (or buffs, debuffs, auras, melee combos, novas, teleports, taunts, stuns, roots, traps, shields, or simple behaviors?)

19. Our Architecture

20. Requirements

21. 1.Easy to Create Abilities

22. Requirements 1.Easy to Create Abilities 2.Easy to Iterate Abilities

23. Requirements 1.Easy to Create Abilities 2.Easy to Iterate Abilities 3.Variety, Variety, Variety

24. Requirements 1.Easy to Create Abilities 2.Easy to Iterate Abilities 3.Variety, Variety, Variety 4.Build System Quickly

25. Requirements 1.Easy to Create Abilities 2.Easy to Iterate Abilities 3.Variety, Variety, Variety 4.Build System Quickly 5.For Engineers

33. One Abilities vs. Modifiers Many

34. Ability Lifetime != Agent Lifetime

35. “Requires Agent”

37. Animation and Movement

38. Abilities own their data

41. Fitting It In

42. Simple AI Definition

43. Behavior Tree

44. AI Definitions

45. Postmortem

52. Fireball Video with Debugging

53. Code DATA

56. while(bCondition == false) bCondition = test1(); bCondition &= test2(); Wait(0.5 seconds); end Multiple Wait Conditions

57. Sounds Good

58. Wait, aren’t you just writing yet another scripting system?

62. How complicated could we handle?

63. Boss Video

64. Abilities… 1.Are ubiquitous 2.Are independent 3.Own their data 4.Require heavy iteration 5.Require code for variety

65. Questions? slides available at Game Of Design http://dankline.wordpress.com dankline@sbcglobal.net lmchugh@gmail.com Gameplay Video