Respeccing Skills and Talents

Before jumping back into the Temple of Seasons showing sprite WIPs and whatnot, I thought I'd bring up another thing we're working on when it comes to the Skills- and Talent systems.

One thing that has been on our mind for the longest of time is how (or if) you're supposed to be able to respec your character in the final game. Our ideas have ranged from allowing people to respec at any time, to only be able to do so once, to doing it at a NPC for a high gold cost, etc.

Now we've finally come to some sort of decision that we'd like to try out, so it'll get implemented in a future update for you guys to beta test.

The Refund button in action!

What we're doing is adding a button called 'refund' (the term isn't exactly correct, but bear with me) to the menu that appears when you select a skill or talent. Using this button will bring you to an interface where you will be able to select if you want to refund one point or refund all points that you've spent on that very skill (or talent).

The drawback is that in order to get your points/orbs back, you will need to sacrifice some gold, which will increase with your level and the amount of points/orbs you wish to refund.

Since I'm in charge of making the GUI-art, I already started working on this (quite simple) interface a while back. It all starts with a sketch:

10/10 art, would draw again

As you can see, the sketch shows three buttons - the third was supposed to be a 'cancel' button, so you wouldn't panic if you forgot how to back within the menu. However, making the rendered version of the interface, we realized it was taking up too much space, and made the whole box look much less attractive. (Besides, you always have tooltips at the bottom of your screen to remind you how to back, if you should forget it for a moment..)

So we did away with that, and settled on only having two buttons, which you can see the progress of here:

Also, yes, the title is very WIP. No idea what it'll be called in the actual game! But we do look forward to hear what you think about this system and how it works out once it's implemented :)

Oh, and since we wanted each Talent page to have the same amount of talents to choose from in the beginning (General had 10, Melee 8, and magic 7), we decided to fill out the Melee and Magic pages with a couple of talents that you suggested over in the Secrets of Grindea forums! The icons can be seen here: