Finalizing the Skill Trees and the Missile Turtle

Anthony Palermo - 5/25/2023

For our final week of dedicated production, I spent most of my time finalizing the assets that would be used with all the skill trees, along with finishing the rework for the missile turtle skill tree and fixing some of the missile turtle's bugs. A good chunk of time was spent trying to find the right assets for the skill tree art and getting those put into the game, while also having them all being in the same style.

The missile turtle skill tree took about the same amount of time as the other skill trees took. Making the fixes to match the other skill trees was quick and easy, deciding what the skills do and implementing them. During the time of testing the skills functions, I ended up discovering several bugs that I would later work on fixing. The skills were pretty simple for the missile turtle, damage increases for the basic and special attacks, while reducing mana cost of the shell defense, and a max health increase.

I found an array of bugs while working on the missile turtle skill tree. The first one was that the player could not end the shell defense ability, and would drain the players mana to zero. Even at zero mana, the ability wouldn't actually end it would just  wait until the player had enough mana to use it again then activate again. This issue was a two fold issue as once I got it to disable the ability when mana runs out, which made it so the ability didn't turn itself on again, the player was still unable to turn the ability off. I found the issue was our player controller did not actually every call the OnUltimateRelease event when the q button was released, once fixing that the shell defense would end when the player released the button.

Following solving that bug, I found another bug with the missile turtle barrage missiles, which was the special attack. Once five missiles had spawned, the player would be able to attempt to launch more missiles, no missiles would spawn, and it would consume mana. This bug was frustrating to deal with and took me an extremely long time trying to find the solution to solve it. Eventually, after spending a good amount of  time reading through all of the code for the missile turtle, I was able to solve it with use of the missile manager.