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Last week's informational update for Planewalker Games' upcoming RPG, The Broken Hourglass, focused on how the game deals with character classes and level advancement. This week the discussion continues with a peek inside Hourglass' inner workings and a quick tutorial demonstrating how to create a new level path with just a few lines of scripting.

There are a number of engine functions which govern the spending of experience points on character abilities. _attribute_upgrade causes a character to spend XP to purchase points in a valid skill or attribute, while _toggle_trait adds a trait to that character. Supporting functions like _can_toggle_trait (to ensure that there are no unmet prerequisites for the trait) and _attribute_upgrade_cost can help us determine whether the purchases we want to make are possible.

But rather than reinvent the wheel and apply this logic every single time a character levels up, we have a function which performs the skill buying and experience bookkeeping automatically. This makes the creation of a new level path extremely easy by following just a few simple rules.

The Broken Hourglass: Creating Level Paths

The Broken Hourglass (add to watch list)

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