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🧩 Health Core Interfaces

📦 Folder Overview

This folder defines the primary interaction surfaces for Health.

These are the interfaces most systems should depend on.

🎯 Purpose

Core interfaces provide:

  • Safe, minimal access to health state and mutation
  • A stable API surface for gameplay, UI, AI, and tooling
  • A way to avoid depending on concrete implementations like HealthSystem

🧩 What Lives Here

IHealthReadonly

Read-only view of health state.

Provides:

  • Current
  • Max
  • Normalized01
  • IsAlive, IsDead
  • IsFull, IsEmpty

Use for:

  • UI (health bars, indicators)
  • AI decision-making
  • telemetry / analytics
  • systems that only need to observe state

Notes:

  • No mutation
  • No dependency on damage/heal pipelines
  • Safe to expose broadly

IHealthWriter

Controlled mutation surface.

Provides:

  • TryHeal(int)
  • Heal(int)
  • SetCurrent(int)
  • SetMax(int, bool)
  • ResetToMax()

Use for:

  • setup / initialization
  • save/load restore
  • debugging / cheats
  • controlled direct mutation flows

Important:

  • Does not guarantee use of the damage/heal pipelines
  • Behaviour (clamping, events, side-effects) depends on implementation

IHealable

Minimal healing interface.

Provides:

  • TryHeal(int)

Use for:

  • lifesteal
  • heal-over-time (HOT)
  • generic support effects

Design intent:

  • Smaller than IHealthWriter
  • Suitable for systems that only need to apply healing

⚠️ Important Notes

  • Prefer interfaces over HealthSystem when sufficient
  • Do not assume mutation methods run through rule pipelines
  • Do not encode gameplay rules into consumers of these interfaces

These are contracts, not behaviour definitions.

🧠 Usage Guidance

Prefer:

  • IHealthReadonly for most systems
  • IHealable for simple healing effects
  • IHealthWriter only when full mutation control is required
  • Health Abstractions
  • Contracts
  • Lifecycle
  • Rules