Feat Selection!

So I've just recently finished the visual aspects of character creation. You can see a video demo of it here:

With that done, I started (and spent most of the last three days working on) the other part of character creation. Stats, skills, classes...you know, the important stuff. The game part of the game.

Given that I already had the level-up process working for classes, attributes and skills, (yes, I implemented leveling up before character creation and yes, that is completely backwards; I'm weird like that) this was actually fairly quick and easy. Only took about a day's worth of work and I already had everything up and running.

Then came the hard part of putting work into the things I hadn't actually done any of yet. A few weeks ago I had a pretty awesome idea on how to handle the feat selection menu, but I never quite had the time to get to it then, since there were more important things to finish first. Well, I've finished those now, so I took a crack at it.

The main idea is: if you've ever played a D&D based game (like, say, Neverwinter Nights), you know that one of the things you pick every few levels is feats. If you, like me, played the game before ever playing pen-and-paper D&D, you've probably had the experience of being completely fucking lost in the feat screen.

If this all sounds like greek to you, feats are essentially special abilities your character earns ever few levels (every 3 for most characters, some classes get additional ones every few levels). They're all binary things: you either have them or you don't, there's no "levels" of them. Some of them are active, some are passive, some have nothing to do with combat. You could think of them as RPG Maker's Skills, but a little more generic.

See, the problem with them is there's fucking hundreds of these things. When you first create a level 1 Fighter   in Neverwinter Nights 2, you get to pick 2 of these (or 3 if you're a Human). The game gives you an enormous shopping list of every damn feat in the game that you qualify for (which even at level 1 is in the order of several dozen) and it's up to you to pick 3. And that's pretty much all the information you get. Hopefully you don't pick something useless that will screw you over for the rest of the game. Good luck!

That's always struck me as an awful way of implementing that. Even now, when I'm more familiar with D&D rules, I still have to double check rulebooks (or, more often, online D&D wikis) to make sure I'm picking things in the correct order and won't screw up and miss a pre-requirement for a feat I'll want to have like 6 levels from now.

So I started thinking: why doesn't this happen in other games? Well, usually you don't have that many choices, but in some games you do. You never feel lost like that when you play Final Fantasy XII or Diablo II though. This is because of how the implement their UI.

The main thing NWN2 is missing is that it requires you to actually know more than you can possibly be expected to know to make a proper decision. There's no way for you to look at that feat screen and know things like "Is this a pre-requisite for a better feat that I can't pick right now?" or "Can I just see the spellcasting feats? I don't really care about all these melee combat ones".

So I came up with a different way of displaying what feats you can select from. It'll look something like a mix between Diablo II's skill trees and Final Fantasy X's sphere grid.

The main point of it will be to display everything you can have, even if you don't qualify for it just yet (so you can have an idea of what to invest in and what might pay off to have down the road), and to divide them all into categories, so you don't feel as overwhelmed by the amount of them and you can easily find feats of a particular type.

That's what I've spent most of the last couple of days working on. Turns out it's a little bit trickier to implement than I expected, but I'm still making progress. With any luck I'll have a working first version of it done in a few days. This is what the menu looks like right now:

It's kind of hard to tell right now, since I haven't actually added very many of them (or drawn any of the connections between them), but the inside of that menu (the part with all the icons) is basically a giant grid. The orange tabs at the top are the categories and the icons are the feats. Hovering the cursor over one shows that tooltip with a feat's name on it. Related feats (i.e.: Power Attack -> Cleave -> Great Cleave) will have lines connecting them (like a skill tree).

Anyway, it'll make more sense when it's done. I'll probably post a video of it when it's all working.