Complete roguelike tutorial using C++ and libtcod - part 9: spells and ranged combat

Complete roguelike tutorial using C++ and libtcod -originally written by Jice Text in this tutorial was released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported and the GNU Free Documentation License (unversioned, with no invariant sections, front-cover texts, or back-cover texts) on 2015-09-21.

part 1: setting up part 2: map and actors part 3: dungeon building part 4: field of view part 5: preparing for combat part 6: going berserk! part 7: the GUI part 8: items and inventory part 9: spells and ranged combat part 10.1: persistence part 10.2: game menu part 11: dungeon levels and character progression extra 1: about editors and IDE extra 2: debugging extra 3: scent tracking extra 4: makefiles extra 5: more generic items

In this article, we'll start to add diversity to the gameplay by adding three new spells :

• lightning bolt : deals damages to the closest enemy
• fireball : powerful area effect spell
• confusion : turns the selected enemy into a randomly wandering zombie for a few turns

The scroll of lightning bolt

This dreadful spell will deal 20 damage to the closest monster, up to a distance of 5 tiles. So the first thing we need is some helper functions to get the closest monster within a range.