So I am still behind schedule, but progress is good! Had a long day working on things today, streamed for an unhealthy 15 hours so.. yeah!

The main changes then: The special abilities in matched chains are now processed correctly. A system was implemented to count those and to add them to your special ability bar. A base defence section of game was created, with a base health bar that responds to chains. Basic orcs were created with very simple AI and attacking to take down the base health! So quite a productive day overall!

A design change was made regarding collecting special abilities, where you now have all abilities types on your ability bar - rather than just 3. Instead of just earning an ability and it sitting there to be used, you can now collect multiple abilities of the same type to work up through the different tiers of that ability. So if you match 3 with special abiltiy tile, you get 1/5 progress to the top tier spell. You can still use that as a tier 1 spell, but you can also choose to collect more to level it up. At 3/5 you get a tier 2 version of the spell. At 5/5 you earn the tier 3 version of spell and no further special ability tile matches of that type will have an effect. This gives the player the choice to "save up" for improved abilties, or use them more often. Below you can see how collecting matches with the ability tiles will "fill" your ability bars at the bottom of the screen. You can click on the spells to use them, but they are yet to be implemented.

The bug from yesterday of counting the abilities was just an oversight by myself in an algorithm - but took two hours to spot and work out! I worked on implementing the special ability hotbar after that. Some art work was drawn up (placeholder… for now) to allow me to start implementing the base defence element of the game. A healthbar was implemented, and to begin it was set to reduce over time as I implemented the matches adding to the base health. Then I went on to implement the enemies, which are very basic at the moment, but have been set up to approach the base and attack when in specific zones. The attacking simply reduces the base health by the enemies attack damage rating. Randomised spawning has been set up, along with sorting out the enemies to face in the right directions when spawned.

Tomorrow I will need to do some planning and designing as the implementation of the base defence is a bit messy and I’d like to give it some further consideration before I get any deeper into it!