Experience and Leveling Up (Patreon)

Earning experience and leveling up will be available in the next patch! In this post I'll first describe how the works, and then talk about some implementation stuff that you can skip if not interested.

Earning experience is fairly straight forward, finish up a mission and you'll now see this End Of Mission screen showing what you have earned (instead of instantly switching to the base screen)

In the base screen, there are two new additions. The first is the resources tab located on the top right that shows you how much Credits and how much Essence you have available.

The second is the Roster view located on the right. In there you get a condensed view of all the characters you have. Under each portrait, there is an experience bar, when that is filled to full, the bar changes to a "Level Up" button which allows you to select which upgrades you want for the character.

This is what the upgrade screen looks like. You get to choose one out of the three randomly presented options. If you don't like the choices, you can spend Essence to reroll. However, do note that currently, there is a limited number of choices implemented and rerolling too much may not do anything. Choices not taken have a chance to show up in future level-ups as well.

In addition, there will be a full respec option in the future so feel free to experiment.

Next I am going to talk about some implementation details. Can skip if not interested.

I have underestimated the amount of work to get experience and level ups working. Let me explain. Game wise, there are 2 relevant data types for this discussion: "SpawnedCharacter" And "CharacterDescription". The game have a CharacterDescription for every character in the roster, but the SpawnedCharacter data is only created when you take the characters into a mission run. For example, when you take Nera and Bianca to a dungeon run, the game only have 2 SpawnedCharacters, one for Nera and one for Bianca, even though there is a CharacterDescription for all three characters.

To make the long story short, I original thought I can just re-purpose the existing code that deal with SpawnedCharacters for experience gain and level ups, but turns out that is a flawed assumption. I had to do more work than anticipated to implement the new stuff that worked directly on the CharacterDescriptions. 

Anyways, this is not a big problem, because much of the base management work is focused on dealing with CharacterDescriptions in the first place. Because in a base, SpawnedCharacters does not exist! 

So I had to start certain work earlier than first planned. As a result, I decided that for next patch, to focus on earning experience and level up working first, and leave the other mechanics to a future build.