Necromancer Player Basic Attack: Lightning Beam

Author: Zak Levine

Date: April 21, 2023

Necromancer Basic Player Attack: Lightning Beam

An issue in Slimegeon and many games are skills that cause time when the player doesn't have to be engaged or cannot perform. To combat this, we added a basic attack to the necromancer that only the player can use without a mana cost. To complete this ability, I decided to add a lightning beam that fits the character and deals minimum damage that grows over time. The three primary functions I needed to tackle when creating this was getting the enemies, resizing the beam, and dealing more damage over time to the same enemy.

First, I had to get the enemies in range and resize the beam to the nearest hit. To complete this, I needed to go into Blender, make a column object, and move the pivot to one face. Setting the pivot to one side allowed me to resize the beam without moving the starting location. Next, I wrote a function that repeats over time to resize the beam based on a hit; if there is no hit, I use a maximum scale to resize the shaft. To get the enemies in range, I decided to use overlaps instead of a hit because the overlaps would allow for a better representation of enemies in the beam and the beam scale being taken care of by the function over time.

The second issue I ran into was how to damage the enemies within the beam. To do this, I made a map with the enemy as the key and a float, damage, as the value. When an enemy entered the overlap, I added it to the map with a default damage value. If the enemy left the overlap, I removed the enemy from the map. I wrote a function that also runs on a repeat delay that deals damage to every enemy on the map based on their specific key amount. After dealing with the damage, I would scale the key by an increased amount to make the subsequent damage inflicted on the enemy higher.

Overall the skill added to the necromancer allows for the player to have a better experience playing this character because they have an ability they can rely on when they are out of mana or need to do minimal damage.