Year 3: Game update: Towers: Dearth Orchid (poison tower)

Dearth Orchid

Research:
The idea for this tower came from a strange place one of the games that i avidly play is dota 2  which is where I drew a bit of inspiration for this tower as there is a hero on this game that has a ability to poison those around them and I wanted to adapt this idea to a tower form.

 

Blueprint:

The blueprints for this tower are very similar to the blueprint on the disperser tower with only one change. The event that get sent to the AI when it is hit by the tower is different to the one on the "disperser" This one is called a called enemy hit by poisoned tower it sends four variables through this event these are Poison damage per sec, Time of poison cloud, radius of poison cloud and tower damage per shot. These variable are essential in the mechanics of this tower later on in the blueprint.

When the AI receives this event from the tower it then it takes three of the variable and saves them on this instance of the tower the variables that are saved are poison damage damage per second, time of poison cloud, and radius of  poison cloud.  The reason these varied in the blueprints easily next we then set the poison Tower hit units of variable to true we then take away from the unit health we use the variable from the events which is tower damage and take this away from the unit health. we then call a custom event on the blueprint called unit hit by poison tower with a check to see if the unit health is less than or equal to 0 and if true we then send the event is called poison tower killed unit it is then sent to where all the damage is dealt with for the AI.

This event start off whatever the AI is hit from poison tower it starts off spawning an actor which is " poison cloud" this is own instance of a blueprint script. It uses the location of the actor and spawns it there it then sends an events to the poison cloud setting variables for all that instance of the object. extends through free variables poison damage per second, time of poison cloud  and radius of poison cloud.

a blueprint instance of the poison cloud

once the poison cloud is born it then has this event "event send info to poison cloud" this then takes three variables with its which are then set on the poison cloud and these are vital to how this blueprint works.once these variables have been set it then set the scale of the poison cloud using theradius of poison cloud variable they also start a delay time at which users the variable time of poison clouds and upon its completion deletes the actor.

When AI passes over the poison cloud it uses a on hits begin overlap actor this then spawned sequence it then casts to both types of AI and if the cast is successful centred events to both AI calledunits entered poison cloud this event also sends whether the poison damage per second variable.

this event is called when the AI leaves the radius of the poison clouds and basically takes away all the damage is receiving from the poison cloud.

This blueprint is on the AI and shows once the AI  enters the poison cloud the event is triggered which then set a variable on the AI called unit in poison clouds to true it then takes the variable poison damage per second and  takes that away from the unit health.  An event click uses a delay of 0.1 seconds and then goes through a branch checking if the unit is in a poison cloud if true it then proceeds to takeaway health from the units  once the AI has left the poison cloud the variable is an change the false stopping the damages receiving from the poison cloud.

Variable balancing:

For this tower there was only three main variables had to be treated and adjusted for its use. these variables are poisoning damage poison second, time of poison cloud and radius of poison cloud

The fair is the variable poison damage per second is set to 20 this means that whenever the AI is within the poison cloud vicinity it takes 20 point damage a second post further playtesting will have to be conducted in order to balance this variable accordingly.

The time of the poison cloud is also relative to the balance of the scour though not as important as the damage the poison cloud does the poison cloud duration is currently set to 15 seconds though this may be tweaked as not to cause unbalanced or even performance impact.

the radius of the poison cloud is available that may not be changed as currently it is a large area that the blueprint occupies it may be tweaked but only by small margins.