Pokemon-like Type Interaction via Blueprints?

Development Programming & Scripting Blueprint
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First, I’m new to the forums here & this is my first post so apologies if I’m mistakenly asking this in the wrong place, but to the point of my post.

I’m fleshing out my prototype for a sort of turn-based team battler with a type-interaction system you’d expect of any pokemon game to put it plainly. A unit can themself be one or two possible types & has a list of moves that are always one of any possible type. These types are represented by an enum, so for example I could have a Fire/Normal unit & it could use an Earth move & would have access to those exact enums.

However I’m hitting a roadblock with how to efficiently take the 3 inputs of the type of the attacking move as well as the 2 types of the defending unit. I currently have a chain of switch on state nodes that account for every possible type interaction for the first defending type then have that funnel-output into the exact same thing for the second defending type. As far as results are concerned this is working flawlessly.

But I worry it’s just too big or I’m not being efficient with my node useage.

  • I tried messing around with making a c++ function library blueprint & while I’m still open to doing that at a certain point somewhere much further down the line, the hurdles I have to jump through just to get that whole mess started is very dissuading.
  • I thought at one point the data table was exactly what I wanted but it seems that’s used more for the purpose of pulling an entire row of data not a single cell

Is there maybe a data type, node, or blueprint class that I’ve glossed over that I can use for this, or is my current switch on state actually about as clean as I can get without using c++? I’m essentially putting 1 row input & 2 column inputs into a grid & wanting the 2 intersected cells as outputs. Any help is appreciated!

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Hello and welcome! Well, as far as my Pokémon knowledge goes, I suppose you need this to calculate super-effectiveness, right?

There are many approaches to this problem, and yours is as valid as any. You can also do what Game Freak does and use a hard-coded solution or even a DataAsset/DataTable solution.

In older Pokémon games, Game Freak manually checks the attack type against the target type(s). In a modern code, it would be something like this:

// Hard-coded example.
switch (Attack.Type)
{
case EType::Fire:
	if (Target.Type.Contains(EType::Bug))
		Damage *= 2
	if (Target.Type.Contains(EType::Grass))
		Damage *= 2
	if (Target.Type.Contains(EType::Water))
		Damage /= 2
	if (Target.Type.Contains(EType::Fire))
		Damage /= 2
	if (etc.)
		...
	break

case EType::Water
	...
}

PS.: Notice that the Pokémon type property is an array of Types Enum.

As you mentioned, you can also apply an edit-friendly solution, like a data table or data asset, where you list the super effective and resistance types multipliers.

Types Enumerator
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Data Struct
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Data Table
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And of course, there are other approaches; it all depends on your project design; these are just the most straightforward methods.:

Also, Ryan Laley is doing a Pokémon like game series. Maybe it can help you.
Remaking Pokémon in Unreal Engine 5 LIVE - YouTube

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