Character death logic has been added, when a character’s health reaches zero the character is DELETED along with all of its associated records, such as its inventory and any active combat records. Having a character’s death be permanent is pretty vital to this type of survival, roguelike. It makes the risk vs reward choices that much more vital. Just don’t get too attached to your character and its stacked inventory of food and cards.
But not all is lost, for I have also added the Graveyard. This is where all characters go when they die and simply stores their name, final score and the user they belong to. Having these records allows for a couple of things. First, it allows for a leaderboard to be posted that displays the top scores of characters alive or dead. It also permits me to make a page that a player can visit to see a history of all their old characters, perhaps as a motivator to beat their personal best score, or maybe just a place to go and mourn your passed characters.
I’ve got some ideas for expanding the stored stats but for now, name and score is all I’m holding onto.
When implementing character death I realized I had many records that needed to be removed from many different tables. At first this seemed daunting, not only would I have to remove the character from its table, but I’d also have to remove every inventory item, any active combats the character was in and then every enemy card associated with that combat. That’s a lot of foreach loops removing a lot of records, one at a time.
Luckily, there is a better way and it’s called Cascading Delete which basically means – when I delete this thing Entity Framework will go ahead and delete everything else associated with it. Then it was just a matter of going back to my models and making sure they were associated properly to begin with. So now, all I do it remove the character in question and Entity Framework takes care of removing all the records associated with that character via a Foreign Key. It was nice to go a learn a new trick that makes things like that easier to handle.
But it’s not all death and deletion, there have also been major strides with the visual design of the game, and I’ve done a lot to make all of the interactions with Nano use ajax. Once you enter the game’s World view, that it, no need to do full page refreshing anymore.
The character death logic was the last “feature” I needed to tackle before the game can be played seamlessly. Next I just need to work on the visual presentation layer of things and add some more content. Once those two things are done, I hope to be ready for some very early playtesting.