Overview
Patchwerk Prototype Project Page
Just implementing Patchwerk wasn’t much, so I added two new heroes to this segment as well. This will also be the last segment. I now have access to the Warcraft 3 Reforged beta, so I’m going to begin work there.
New Heroes
The two new heroes added were Frost Mage and Havoc Demon Hunter. These were the second and third damage heroes, and now we have a full party of a tank, a healer, and three damage heroes.
Patchwerk
The Patchwerk fight is still very difficult. I never got to tweaking it to get it to a reasonable and fun difficulty. However, moving on to Reforged, I have a good idea of the things I need to change based on how this particular set of balancing values turned out.
In its current state, it’s probably only possible to beat if you play 100% perfectly, but it’s pretty reasonable to survive and play the fight a while before Patchwerk enrages at 30%, when the fight becomes too difficult to survive.
On to Reforged
Although I could have implemented more for this project, I did get to the minimum version: a full party plus a boss for them to fight. I could continue to work on this, but the point of this project was to re-familiarize myself with Warcraft 3 and build some work up in preparation for Reforged.
I took a quick look around the Reforged editor and it doesn’t seem significantly different. I now regret not doing this prototype in Warcraft 3’s JASS script, rather than trigger blocks. I incorrectly assumed proprietary JASS from way back when Warcraft 3 was first released wouldn’t still be used. However, it wasn’t a complete waste. Warcraft 3 allows the conversion of existing triggers to scripts, meaning the set of triggers I created for this prototype can be converted into a set of JASS code samples to learn from.
Learning JASS will be my first order of business for the Reforged mod. It’ll take a bit of time to ramp up on JASS, but it will allow me to be significantly more productive than I would be using the GUI once I’m familiar with it. After that, I’m going to try to have my balance scripts automatically generate JASS that initializes heroes. Outputting to a text file then setting the values from that text file into Warcraft 3 variables was alright and much better than setting them in the GUI, but it still would have been pretty tedious if I got to lots of heroes or wanted to do frequent changes. Having the balance scripts output JASS would allow balancing changes to be tested instantly, requiring no tedious work to update.
Although I’m a bit disappointed there don’t seem to be significant functional upgrades to the Reforged editor, I expect I’ll find some of the flexibility I’m looking for in switching to JASS. Even if the Reforged editor capabilities are functionally identical to the old Warcraft 3, at least it’ll look much better.
