Reworking the skill trees

Anthony Palermo - 5/18/2023

Along the same lines of last week, this week I worked on reworking the skill trees which had previously left unfinished to prioritize work on other more important aspects of the project. I have gone through the process of finishing all of the skill trees except for the missile turtle skill tree which is what I will be working on first for our next week of work. I also began working on finding or making art for the skill trees, but that is not majorly important towards my job as a developer.

I decided to make the skill trees have a uniform shape last week, and made adjustments to all the skill trees to make certain they looked the same and functioned the same. I had a few things in the Beastiary pages that needed minor adjustments, such as some text that wasn't wrapping around and ended up going of the screen in the necromancer page.

The skill trees I worked on was the finishing touches to the lich along with the entirety of the ghoul, necromancer, and skeleton. The ghoul was rather straight forward, the skills were primarily increases to damage and other stats. The only part of the ghoul that took a bit of time was working on the leap, as I wanted to have the leap go further after a specific skill unlock. I was able get that working after talking with other members of the team to direct me to where in the code the ghouls leap was. The necromancer was a similar story, with the only skill that caused be trouble to implement was a skill which would refund the health cost of summoning the undead minions when they died. The issues came from a couple of different places, but I chose to remove it and replace it with one that made the minions have more health due mostly to there being an issue where the health cost of summoning the minions does not consistently use the same amount of health.

The skeleton skill tree was one that I had the easiest time implementing, but also took the longest to implement. The reason it took so long was due to our group working on fixing an extremely overpowered ability the skeleton had. While dashing, if the player tried to use the basic attack, the attack would shoot three arrows. This was intentional, but would one hit kill most enemies and worked with the bomb and lightning arrows. So we decided to both lock the ability behind the skeleton skill tree, and split it further into a skill called Double Shot which allows the skeleton to shoot two arrows after holding the dash button down and then another skill that changes Double Shot into Triple Shot.