Day 6 (11/23/2010)
11. Weapon Archetype System
When designing the system for towers to be placed, I thought it would be cool to only have a few base tower classes and then allow for a lot of per tower customization and attributes through the use of Archetypes so I can tweak settings within the editor instead of compiling every time I wanted to change a setting and so that if anyone picks up my project they can add their own towers by just creating archetypes instead of figuring out how to derive and code their own towers. I figure I want to make modding design elements as easy as possible so that if one design doesn't work I can quickly switch to another. The problem with this was, I have had no experience in creating a dynamic system that uses object archetypes rather than actual hard coded classes. Being that towers might be a complex feat to make into an archetypal system as my first project with archetypes, I decided that I should convert the current weapon system to use archetypes so I have something to base on. This took a bit of time to figure out all the kinks, but what I ended up with was a solid base for a really cool way to create new games with ease and test weapon systems without compiling. This means that once I fully develop a custom weapon class, all in-game weapons will be based off of the same weapon class but their attributes will be set with object archetypes. Of course, the archetypal system should also allow for archetypes of classes that derive from my base weapon class, and that is supported simply by the fact that UnrealScript is already heavily object oriented.
Here is a really long and boring video of a brief overview of my most recent Dev Diary posts and how to use the Weapon Archetype System. One day I'll get a better voice, I swear. <_<
