1.7 KiB
Gameplay Ability System Decision
Decision: defer Unreal's Gameplay Ability System for the MVP.
Agrarian should not adopt GAS during version 0.01 or the early version 0.1 survival foundation. The current project already has focused replicated components for survival, inventory, crafting, resources, building placement, time, weather, interaction, and early movement modifiers. Those systems are small, readable, and directly aligned with the immediate playable MVP.
GAS is useful for games with many networked abilities, buffs, cooldowns, attribute effects, prediction needs, tags, and reusable gameplay effects. That will probably matter later for Agrarian when character skills, injuries, illnesses, professions, equipment, medicine, combat, aging, and long-term condition effects become more complex.
For now, adding GAS would increase setup cost, content complexity, debugging surface, and onboarding burden before the project has enough gameplay variety to benefit from it.
Guideline:
- Keep MVP survival systems implemented through explicit C++ components and Blueprint assets.
- Keep future stat/effect code modular enough that it can migrate into GAS if the need becomes clear.
- Revisit GAS after version 0.1 once combat, skills, injuries, medicine, profession bonuses, equipment effects, and replicated long-term status modifiers are better defined.
Revisit trigger:
- The project has many recurring timed effects, buffs, debuffs, cooldowns, or ability activations that are becoming duplicated across systems.
- Multiplayer prediction for ability-style actions becomes important.
- Designers need data-driven effect stacking, gameplay tags, and reusable effect authoring more than hand-coded component behavior.