The Legend of Zelda: Forgotten Gates

Things have finally picked up a bit at my job, which means I didn't have extra time to expend on Forgotten Gates, and I probably won't going forward. Still, things are creeping along. I've squashed several bugs in the combat code, and I'm starting in on reimplementing the heroes' special abilities.

While working on the Fight skill, I ran into a dilemma. Since my new DynBattleChoices-based targeting system cannot allow multiple targets, I had to decide what to do when a hero is dual-wielding. These were my basic options as I saw it:

• Have the hero attack the same target with both weapons. This seemed like the most obvious and sensible option, but it turned out rather tricky to implement in my combat plugin.
• Represent dual-wieldable weapons as "sets" of two which are really a single two-handed weapon in mechanical terms. That would work as things currently stand because the only weapons that can be dual-wielded are daggers. I used to have a couple of heroes planned that dual-wielded short swords, but they wound up being replaced. Still, it would mean players can't mix-and-match the dagger types, and it would be odd for the Throw ability one of the heroes has -- why would she always throw both?
  
• Simply remove dual-wielding as a possibility. Probably the least attractive option, this would lower the cool factor and make daggers a pretty weak option. I could always make them inherently stronger of course, and allow dagger wielders to use a shield as well, but then they'd be hardly any different from sword-and-shield users.

I wound up going with option 1, working through the difficulties in the plugin. It involved adding the potential for a second battle animation in each "battle effect", and going back through the chain of battle effects to tweak them. What do I mean by "battle effect"? Well, I think I might as well make that the topic of the design post I'm making right after this. ;)