Summary:
In which a fox-shadow gains an empowered version; a new spell summons bone-walls; another new spell summons METEORS; certain spell-damages are tweaked; a new spreadsheet aids in spell-balancing; artefacts and spell-icons gain art; more highlights are included into the game's art-style; a cursor is tweaked; and a bare beginning has been made towards the "codex" feature.
Greetings and salutations!
This week's screenshot shows the effect of a new defensive spell:
The week just past was a decent one, I think!
With a few exceptions, it had two main thrusts: "attacking"-spells, and art:
In last week's blog-post, I believe, I reported on a new spell that summons a fox-shadow to defend the player. In the week just past, then, I implemented its "empowered" version--the version that the player gains temporary access to via the use of a "Rune of Power" item.
In this incarnation, the spell again summons a fox-shadow--but here it rapidly orbits around the player-character. In doing so it wards off incoming projectiles, rendering the player pretty much invulnerable to such attacks.
However, this effect is very brief: in just seconds its mana is used up, and the shadow vanishes until the player regains enough mana to re-summon it.
With that in place, I moved on to two new spells.
The first of these is another defensive spell, this time drawn from a liche's heart.
In its base form, it conjures temporary walls of bone by which the player may defend themselves or hinder others:
And in its empowered form, its effect is as shown in the first screenshot above: it summons ring-walls of brittle bone around all nearby foes, blocking them and their attacks for a short while.
The second new spell is perhaps one of my favourites: the spell of the
meteor!
In effect, this is the "rocket launcher" of the game: it calls up meteoroids and fires them forth, to explode on impact or on reaching their maximum range--either way damaging things caught within their blast-radius. (The player potentially included.)
In its base form, the spell produces up to three small meteoroids at a time. In its empowered form, it conjures a single, larger meteoroid--which, instead of exploding itself, shatters into five smaller ones that then explode!
And along the way I ended up making some tweaks to various weapon damage-values.
Indeed, I further decided to put in place a spreadsheet detailing various weapon-values (including damage-per-specond), and which has already proven useful in allowing me to compare my various combat-spells.
Moving over to the art-side, in the week just past I went through and painted item-images and spell-icons for the various artefacts and combat-spells that are currently implemented.
I'm hesitant to post all of these (especially my favourite, the fox-charm), but here below are two new ones, and one updated one:
Furthermore, I made a decision (although admittedly a tentative one) for the game's art-style to include more highlights for particularly shiny objects--metals and crystal, primarily.
To that end, I went back and added such highlights to a few objects that previously didn't have them. You can see this in the orange crystal above, and here below it should be visible in two of the health-related items:
(And while I was at it, I added outlines to the health-crystals, which had previously lacked them.)
And last of these art-style changes, I reworked the in-menu cursor a little, adding highlights and changing some of the internal lighting.
In other matters, in the week just past I made a bare start at implementing the game's "codex", including the addition of a page for it in the "Status Screen".
And finally, as before, there were various tweaks, fixes, and changes that don't seem worth detailing here!
That then is all for this week--stay well, and thank you for reading! ^_^