Make Souls useful

[Asuza]

Souls don't really do anything right now, but maybe they should. Some ideas:

Persistent Options:

• Boost Max HP/DEF/ATK
• Mine Enhancement (extra diamonds per turn)

Special Abilities, single-use per soul:

• Ghost: Allow movement past any blocking object (or line of objects)
• Leap: Jump into the air and land in a random empty space
• Vivify: Revive a fallen teammate with 1 HP whose soul is still on the field

[Asuza]

@natedsaint what do you think?

[natedsaint]

Sorry was on vacation. I have some counter-questions:

• Do we track this anywhere on the player during play? I feel like we do, if so maybe the bonus status work.
• I'm fine with special actions but we only have 4 commands for directional movement right now, which was by design. This might work if we simply let you move through a blocking object if you move towards it, or automatically revive someone, but otherwise we'd need to implement a system where we accept other commands and handle the situation where the command was given but isn't legal (don't have soul, used ability that you don't have access to).
• This is getting long, but I think we might want to look into re-writing the system so that we have a class or object that represents an action or item and then extend it for various things so that we can more easily track this and deal with it. Thoughts?

[Asuza]

If this doesn't cover everything, let me know!

• We track the number of souls gathered, so it would be easy to build something around that.
• I think most of the code that handles movement/commands is at https://github.com/JSJitsu/ai-battle-engine/blob/552175ed131c3266494b3938a73ef960b0f0dd3b/lib/game_classes/Game.js#L257 so it should be relatively easy to add new commands without needing to rewrite the whole thing.
• I'm not opposed to rewriting how the engine works to be easier to maintain and extend... I just don't see myself having time for that big of a change anytime soon.

[natedsaint]

Huh, I hadn't thought of that (bullet 2). I suppose we could just change it to "_handleHeroAction" and accept more than four verbs, and handle anything invalid like we do now (I think we drop it on the floor and assume they didn't want to move).

The question would be would it be an action in ADDITION to a direction, or just a new value in the enumeration of possible actions? I see more cost to the first approach than the second, but the second limits what we can do.

[Asuza]

Making it an addition to the direction makes sense to me, and would be a literal game-changer. We'd have to figure out how things should be ordered, which I assume should be like so:

1. Move
2. Existing damage calculations
3. Action

Though it might not follow a consistent order if a certain action uses up the move, or if the action itself requires a direction, or the action prevents the "auto-attack" phase from happening.