Fragment’s Moonrise | #21 The Lesser Dragon of Lightning news

We’ve been working on some new boss mechanics and features, one of which includes a boss who can spellcast at great distances.

This gets a bit tricky given how our Fog of War system functions- since we have such huge Maps, we need a method of handling lots and lots of Units. In Fragment’s Moonrise, our Unit AI and all our various features necessary for the Unit to function are quite complicated. There are tons of lines of code that need to run per each Unit to handle all the various features on each Unit, and these need to run each frame.

As such, as part of our Fog of War system, Units that are in Fog are not only hidden, but fully disabled. This is important because we definitely do not want to run so many Units at once, we only want to run them when Player engages with them. This is coupled with the fact that there are features we still want to run on Units while their disabled, like HP Regeneration, so we utilize Time to ensure that as they are disabled, when they are re-enabled, those features run for the X amount of Time they were disabled for. This gives them the ‘sense’ that they were never truly disabled, without having to utilize the CPU.

Given that Units are only enabled if they are out of Fog, we need a way around this. Fortunately, the fix is incredibly simple: on desired Units (the Lesser Dragon of Lightning) have them completely ignore the fog. This means they are always enabled, which might sound bad on the CPU, but given that its only very specific and rare Units, its quite fine.

Now, we can take advantage of all the various features we want, like an elongated sight and attack radius to make it so this Dragon can strike from very far distances.

Onto the fight, Player must wade through a sea of enemies before they’ll be able to get to the boss. This means dodging is critical to surviving here, and bypassing some enemies just to get closer to the Dragon itself may be a good idea, even if you do procure a lot of damage in the process.

Given this new addition, the best thing to do with it is add it around to other various minibosses. Introducing the Kolhunter Toad, another long-range attacker, but this time, every strike it lands pulls the hit Unit towards it. There’s a lot of room for creativity in just this single variable, so we’re looking forward to designing even more interesting bosses, minibosses, and even creatures based around this concept.

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