Reworking Leveling Up

[Kitt]

I'm currently working on an AoS map, and each hero has 3 skills instead of the normal four. 2 skills that somehow compliment an Ultie or Trump skill. Then each hero can pick two skills from a pool of 24 to customize the hero for differing situations, totalling 5 skills overall. The custom skills are a bit of a bother to do, and I currently have two questions that need answering concerning them.

1) Is there any way to change what is contained inside of a spell book. I could always just put the skills in a shop and have them "buy" them, but it would be a lot better to use a spell book that contains the skills. Then they can just select the skills from their hero, and not need to run over to some shop. The issue, though, is I need to be able to remove the skill they picked from the book, so as to prevent selecting the same skill twice, which would end up doing nothing useful, and cheat them out of a skill. As such, being able to change the contents of a spellbook at runtime is essential for this particular method.

2) To do the above, it would be also convenient to replace the red level up cross with a custom spell book skill. It would contain the three preset skills, and two more spellbook skills each containing 12 skills. Upon selecting a skill from there for leveling, it would be added to the custom level up skill book for future leveling up. Finally, after two skills were selected, the spellbooks containing skills would be removed, leaving 5 skill to be leveled as the player chooses. The fundemental bit here, is removing the normal level up cross, and putting my own in it's slot.

3) Both sound like they have a high probability of not being possible. Should they turn out to be flat out impossible, any suggestions as to an alternative way or method to realize my goals are also appreciated.

If anything was convoluted and unclear, just let me know and I can clarify. Thank you for any and all help you provide ^^

Meow =3

 

[Effane]

I dont think you can modify that red level up skill button to the best of my knowledge. I think its part of the Hero makeup.

But I can think of a good way around this. You can make skills purchasable through a vendor that each hero gets, something like a house or whatnot. Each "house" region would contain vendors with all the skills they can acquire, and just make the quantity for each skill 1 and not refresh. IMO this would be much better.

Now to give it flavor, make them into something believable, like spirits, or patron gods, or even just trainers for the skills.

If you want a spellbook feel to gaining these skills, have the trainers give the player heroes spellbooks with the tome icon, leave them resellable/refundable so players can make up for the "whoops" I clicked on the wrong spell factor.

****Disclaimer, I reread your post and somehow I ran too quick over item 1 the first time, but I had some additional ideas to post anyways.****

Additional idea. You can make skills on the player that act like a spell book and then remove them and add the skill they select. Now this will give you a vendorless system. Now here is the drawback. I cannot think of any good trigger to find out what skills are already preset on the hero and make sure they dont double select. Hero - Level of Ability I dont think will return a result. You will have to create a variable to store the ability and check before assigning the skill that the variable doesnt have certain results in it.

To do that you will need to assign each ability to a number from 1-24 or whatever. When you put that ability on the character the AbilityArrayPlayer1[Slot1/Slot2] would then be checked for the matching number for that ability, (I would suggest 0 = no ability). If either slot has the number for it, you abort the add/remove ability and send a nasty message to the player.


Hope that helps.

 

[AceHart]

Player - Disable ability for player

However, if that player has two or more units with the same, it will remove that ability from all units.


Adding spells to a Spell Book is rather simple.
Just add another spell book ability that contains just that one new skill to the unit.
And use the same disable action to disable the new spell book.
The idea being that abilities inside spell books show up in all spell books that unit has.
Provided all spell books use the same "data - order id".

 

[Kitt]

The litte spell book trick did work, and beautifully I might add. The next task is to make a set of "do nothing" skills for each learnable skill that essentially runs a trigger that gives said unit the real version of the skill when used.

Also, a cool little side note, if you give the unit an empty spellbook as their only skill, upon leveling up, no red plus icon shows. I'm assuming it's because spellbook doesn't actually have any levels past one, leaving the hero with nothing to level up, and so the game doesn't bother showing it. This leaves slot (3,1) wide open for use, and in this case, replacement.

Thanks for the help, both of you ^^
Meow.