Coding Skills: Future Developments 11.0

While spells themselves are fairly easy to implement given they generally only have one feature that needs work on, a spell that summons other beings to fight alongside the main character will be much more difficult to code. These are called summons, and they can be used by the player to create ethereal beings that will either fight for the player until their health runs out, or their summon time runs out.

Summoning:

Summoning will require magic points just like any other spells, and will always cost 60% of the total magic bar remaining, until it cannot go below a certain fixed value, for example 25. Therefore, if the magic points remaining were 26, then 60% of 26 would be 15.6, and therefore a summon would not be possible, since the minimum cost is 25. Moving on, for now the summons will be fairly basic; a pack of wolves that only deal damage to enemies. Later on their can be summons which heal the player and do damage to enemies, but that will be too complicated for now. Starting of with the visual effects of the wolves, they will be done using the unity VFX graphs. These allow users to make custom visual effects. Rather than making the wolves an entity with a physical body, labelling them as ghostly makes VFX make sense, allowing the player to pass through them. They will need AI for them to function however, which will require nav meshes. The simplest way I can think of doing this right now is creating a nav mesh for each individual wolf with a radius of about say 50 metres, which the wolf will be able to roam. Any enemy in that 50m radius will be marked with a waypoint, which the wolf will then be instructed to patrol along. If the field of vision of the wolf sees an enemy, it will change states to attack, where a series of custom animations will be displayed, dealing damage. This will also require different damage taken animations from the enemies, which I will have to work on independently. These summons will also need a health bar, which will function in the same way the player's health bar does. If the health runs out, a small visual effect of smoke dissipating will play, and if the wolves are alive by the end of their 45 second timer, the same smoke dissipation will play.

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Image Source: https://kotaku.com/elden-ring-lone-wolf-spirit-ashes-how-to-get-church-ell-1848703303