Grappling with Gackle – Joshua Pelkington | Programming Intern Dev-Log #8


Me and the Troupe Heading to Defeat Gackle for the 143rd Time

The Gackle Boss Bout has been a popular topic on my devlogs for the past few weeks, but that has finally come to an end. After this week or course : )

Enjoy some highlights from my final week of Gackle Boss Bout fixes and progress:

I had previously setup the ability to hit all of Gackle’s fans at once, but there were some bug released from this change. This week I spent some time fixing these issues and getting Otto his full power!

The first bug was that Otto’s Joke would check all fans as a group. This doesn’t seem like an issue at first, but it ultimately means that all fans have 1 chance to check for full Affinity. If one fan had full affinity, but another did not, then none of them would be entertained, and the Joke would fail. Now sometimes when I get a tough problem like this one, I dont know what to do. Luckily, as ORK was made by a person, he has a website to ask him questions on how somebody might do things! It’s called the ORK Forum and they had a great solution for looping through each fan as if it was its own.

The second bug was now Otto could entertain every fan even if their Affinity was not full. This was due to an oversight where I skipped the check of the combatant’s affinity and simply assumed if one combatant had full, then they all would. While this would work for single 1v1 battles, for the boss it failed miserably. A simple Affinity check was good enough to set that up correctly.

Items are not just for Otto you know! Gackle has found some of his own, and plans to use them to stop Otto in his tracks! As soon as he learns how of course…

This is less of a fix and more of a feature implementation, but I was tasked with getting Gackle to use some healing items for himself, and Affinity lowering items for his fans. ORK makes this fairly simple, as you can give Combatants items and have them use them using their Battle AI. I just setup some notes to let Gackle know when his health was low, or when his Fans’ Affinity needed to be dropped. Of course he can also run out just like Otto, so I added some RNG in there to make it more interesting.

Sometimes its hard for the members of Otto’s Troup to know personal boundaries. When Otto finished his Bout with Gackle, the fans he had entertained to his side would stick around and clutter his Troupe. 

We cant have that! So I spent some time determining where the ORK nodes needed to be and got to work. This turned out to be another situation where the ORK Forum was a huge help, as he got me started with what nodes I should use to solve this problem. I was able to loop through all of the temporary fans and get them outta there!

The Weeks To Follow

Now that I am just about finished up with Boss Bout stuff, I plan on working on new features needing implementation, and some of the many bugs needing fixing. Should be a productive week either way.

Always a Good Time For Some Jam

A Game Jam of course! In about 2 weeks (June 11th), the GMTK Game Jam will start and last for 2 days! I plan on entering if I have the time and nothing last minute crops up. Will be a fun time to flex my creativity and bust out all of my programming knowledge. This one is usually a big one too so its gonna be exciting seeing what everyone comes up with, and of course what will the Jam theme be?? Here is the preview video to set the mood:


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