1. InsideAbilities Daniel Kline and Lauren McHugh

4. What are Abilities? Architecture Postmortem Table of Contents

5. What is Darkspore?

6. Darkspore Video

7. What Are Abilities?

8. Games with lots and lots of different "attacks" and "spells" and "buffs".

9. Every Interaction in World of Warcraftis an Ability.

10. But… Abilities are Ubiquitous

11. What's the most basic ability?

12. What's the most basic ability?

13. Fireball Video

14. What Does a Fireball Do? Caster Projectile • Projectile Targeting • Projectile LocomotionImpact DamageImpact and Hit EffectsExplosion TargetingExplosion DamageExplosion Impact • Explosion Hit Effects Target Validation Warmup AnimationLag DetectionCast AnimationCooldownPower/Mana CostsProjectile Creation "Muzzle" Effects Release Animation

15. This is our simple example!

16. Our Challenge

17. How do you make 100 different Fireballs?

18. How do you make 100 different Fireballs? (or buffs, debuffs, auras, melee combos, novas, teleports, taunts, stuns, roots, traps, shields, or simple behaviors?)

19. Our Architecture

20. Requirements

21. Easy to Create Abilities Requirements

22. Easy to Create Abilities Easy to Iterate Abilities Requirements

23. Easy to Create Abilities Easy to Iterate Abilities Variety, Variety, Variety Requirements

24. Easy to Create Abilities Easy to Iterate Abilities Variety, Variety, Variety Build System Quickly Requirements

25. Easy to Create Abilities Easy to Iterate Abilities Variety, Variety, Variety Build System Quickly For Engineers Requirements

33. Abilities vs. Modifiers One Many

34. Ability Lifetime != Agent Lifetime

35. “Requires Agent”

36. “Requires Agent”

37. Animation and Movement

38. Abilities own their data

41. Fitting It In

42. Simple AI Definition

43. Behavior Tree

44. AI Definitions Behavior Tree

45. Postmortem