With the intended patch date drawing ever closer, it's time to make a decision concerning the buffs and how many times it'll be possible to upgrade each skill.
In the end, we decided to divide the buffs into three, so they're now divided into one that boosts you damage and crit, one improved version of haste (increased cast and attack speed) and a defense and shield boosting buff that's yet to be named:
Our reasoning is that separating attack/castspeed from the damage buff allows for more varied builds, and each of the buffs can be stronger than they could be if they buffed more things. With that in mind, we'll likely cap each of the Utility skills at three silver points as well, with each level making a bigger difference.
Now that the buffs are in place, it's time to implement the targeting system for them. As mentioned in a previous post, you'll be able to buff your friends in multiplayer one at a time, with a system similar to what we use for the Frosty Friend: you start channeling the spell, and as you do so several arrows will appear showing your friends. Press in the direction of the friend you want to buff and the buff will land on them. To buff another friend, simply cast the spell again and press in another direction. In order to buff yourself, you'll need to press upwards after channeling the spell - but only in multiplayer. In single player the buff will automatically target yourself.
Our first idea was to show each character's face along with the arrows, but as Teddy started implementing this targeting system, he came up with a different plan: showing the entire characters, including what they're doing:
While this wasn't exactly what we had in mind from the beginning, it kind of grew on us as we tried it out. At the very least it makes it easier to know which direction you need to press for which friend, as you can check what they're doing right now and compare it to what's going on in the arrows, while our previous idea would make things a little confusing if you had several friends with the same face and hairstyle.
One might argue that this version is a lot more messy, and I supposed they'd be right: however, seeing as you'll not bring up this interface a lot after confirming which direction your friends are in (most likely you'll just quick-cast your buffs as seen below once you get a hang of it, anyway), we don't view this as a too great drawback.
As can also be seen above, if you bring up the cast menu again after buffing everyone, you'll see a timer counting down on top of each character. This times shows how much time is left before the buff runs out, which makes it easier saving up EP. Once the buffs run out an icon and text will appear above each character which indicating that this has happened (as seen below). This will only be visible to the one who cast the buff(s). You can always recast a buff before it runs out, so long as you have the EP to do so.
In the above GIFs, the arrows used are placeholder arrows (the Frosty Friend's arrows, to be precise), with the character stuck randomly on top of them. Because we didn't have any arrows that fit this purpose already, I made a bunch. The bottom image shows how we intend to place the characters on top of them, which is slightly different to how they're standing on the yeti arrows as well:
Finally, we made some adjustments to a couple of the skill icons added the other day (blink and stasis to be precise). We changed blink from green to avoid it looking like a heal, and stasis needed some color to make it clearer when it's unavailable (skills gray out when you can't use them):
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