Offense Utility Skills (First Prototypes)

Prototyping the skills is quite fast work, (as always it's the last 5% - the polish - that take 95% of the time). Today, we'll look at the next set of utility skills, those categorized as offense!

First, the Death Mark! This skill has a new targeting system, which can be seen above. It basically aims at whatever enemy is the closest to your target, which you can move around the screen so long as you hold down the spell button.

Everything you see here is prototype graphics, so it will likely look a lot different in the end, but the general gist of it is that as you do damage to a target with Death Mark, a meter of some sort (in this case it will probably be a sword) will start to fill up. Once a set amount of time has passed, the mark will trigger and deal bonus damage based on how much you've already damaged the target. The more you've filled the meter, the more damage it will do when it trigger - so you better try to get as much damage as possible on your target before that happens, to maximize the bonus damage. If the damage Death Mark will do is enough to kill the target, it will automatically trigger and execute the enemy for you before the timer runs out. 

Taunt/Challenge lacks all of the relevant graphics, but works much as described earlier: you challenge an enemy by shouting some insults at it, causing the both of you to deal more damage against each other. Upon leveling the skill, you'll be able to target more enemies:

Sleep, or rather, Stasis is the skill we've come the furthest with graphics wise. The mechanics are fairly straight forward and as described previously: the targeted enemy gets put in a stasis from which it's released either when a new enemy gets put into stasis or when you hit it. 

Here's the first prototype version, simply freezing the enemy in place:

In the second iteration, a flashing light was added to indicate when an enemy is about to come out of stasis:

Finally, some visual effects were added, and as it is, we're already pretty satisfied with the way it looks right now - we might just add some small effect for when an enemy gets hit by the spell and otherwise keep it the way it is: