[UPD] Spells, Water

What's new?

This update is, in my opinion, pretty lacking in new features. The water spell now has a proper visual representation with a projectile, impact visuals, and area effect. The Water Mage has a new walk cycle and death animation. More on those in the Technical section. Don't get too excited at this next part: Mob difficulty increases over time, and mob subtypes have been added. Elite and Boss variants of mobs can spawn, with bosses capped to 1 per difficulty stage. At the moment they're just glorified regular mobs that deal more damage and have more health. I intend to do something more interesting with them in the future.

Bugs retired: 3

• Player model can rotate slightly on collision
• Items and spell choices are not randomized
• Death Spell causes severe slowdowns and freezing

Technical

Here we are again and honestly, there wasn't much happening on the backend. I'm still experimenting with a Kanban-style workflow to keep myself organized, as it's becoming counterproductive trying to work with just my humble task list. As of this update, mobs are spawning from pools that are tied to the map's biome - but there are no new mobs, nor any new maps at the moment, so I left its description out of the main update section. Other than that, the waters were quite calm. I'd say the biggest challenge this time around was on the art side of things; which I'd like to share here. So here it is - I made a water projectile and animated it:

And I hated this one, which is on theme, but I scrapped it the moment I saw the finished animation in-game.

So it was back to the drawing board, with questions to boot. How can I make this "feel" like water? How do I stick to a particular theme? What would an interesting water projectile look like? Turns out just sketching some ideas on paper was all I needed to get a decent idea. I decided on a three-strand braid.

It's far from perfect, but I like this quite a bit better than what I started with, and the colors more closely match the theme of the Water Mage. Speaking of...

Don't think I've forgotten about this one. Took loads of time to get looking decent, without being an epilepsy risk. Still doesn't look quite right but I can always do another pass to polish things up a bit.

Up Next:

Desperately requiring attention is the UI. It's ugly, it looks disorganized, the text doesn't even scale correctly. I'd also like to start making some sounds.