Riftrunner Peek of the Week #13

The thirteenth installment of RPGVault’s “Peek of the Week” feature for the upcoming Divine Divinity sequel is now available. This time, Larian’s Mike Slembrouck talks about how tactics are implemented in the game. Here’s a little something to get you started:

Now that all the pieces of Riftrunner finally fall into place, it is finally time to give the characters special tactics during combat. The thing about tactics is that all the other stuff like skills, effects… must work first, before the implementation of tactics can begin.

We’ve created a framework to simplify the creation of new tactics. Every character has a bunch of plans to execute, which contain a series of actions. We can add conditions to a plan to determine when a plan can be executed. For example, you can create a plan ‘heal plan’, which simply consists of an action, ‘UseSkill(“healing”)’. This requires two conditions, ‘EnoughMana’ and ‘VitalityCritical’. So, a character will heal himself if he has enough mana and if his vitality becomes critical.