Abilities

Abilities in Chronicles of Aether form the core of what makes combat interesting. There need to be techniques to suit all combat styles, from the up close and personal face tanking barbarian to the glass cannon long range spellcaster, there should always be abilities that prove interesting to use.

So with this goal in mind abilities are built up from a pool of constituent parts, defined in some data files. The available parts are are follows:

1. A Targetting style. I currently have Self, Enemy, Ally, Tile or Direction.
2. A Movement style. I currently have Smite (takes no travel time to hit, ignores everything until it hits its target), Bolt (has a travel time, collides with first non-passable thing) and Ray (hits everything in a ray up to the first non-passable thing).
3. An aoe style. Currently supports Cone and Circle.
4. Some effects (applied to each affected tile). Currently supported are Damage, Healing, Status, Teleport (this is used for all effects that move an entity).

Some examples:
Fireball

• Targetting: Direction
• Movement: Bolt
• AOE: circular
• Effect: Damage (maybe even a status effect if you want to add some burning too)

Jump Attack

• Targetting: Enemy
• Movement: Smite
• Effect: Damage, Teleport (with a flag saying it should play a leap animation rather than a teleport one)

Heal

• Targetting: Self, Ally
• Movement: Smite
• Effect: Heal

Shown below are some examples of usable abilities currently in the game: