Welcome back for another design blog! Since our last blog we have gotten animations into the game, power up items, and improved room layouts with enemies. Got a bit to cover, so lets get into it!

Enemies

As we moved to integrate more enemies into our game we decided to make a switch from our current system for enemies into the A* system. This has made it possible for us to introduce a new enemy, our resident flying eyeball, the seraph. 

We started off with 5 pieces of concept art for the seraph and needed to pick a solid direction to move into. The Seraphic and Ophanim felt like the best representation of what I had envisioned for the flying eyeball, but neither one felt quite right. In order to build onto the creepy and unnatural feel of our other enemies, I decided that the eyeball needed some hand like talons that would give it a clear way of striking the player. Because of this we decided to build upon the Seraphic, removing its halo and a pair of wings to replace with the talons.

This version of the enemy feels great, especially with the addition of eye textures painted onto the wings, minimizing our poly count while maximizing our vision *bah dum tss*

We also built upon the concepts for the skeleton enemies. We wanted to have 2 variants of the skeleton, a long range archer, and a shorter range lancer. The archer has a Robin Hood themed design to help the player easily identify it as an archer while the lancer carries around a kite shield to help show its defensive nature. The player will need to either maneuver around the lancer or stun it to create an opening. 

While these enemies are not quite ready to show more in depth, I am very excited to show it to you in the near future.

Items

As the player navigates the castle they will encounter chests with special power ups available to the player. These power ups are only accessible through chests as the nature of money scaling in our game would create a large imbalance if they were able to be purchased from the shop. The goal for these items is to modify the way that the player is able to use their character and should not feel like a static stat increase. 

The serrated stone will add a bleed effect to melee attacks caused by the player. If the player has a higher melee attack stat then the bleed will do increased damage. This should add the ability for the player to not only have an increase in damage per second but also give the player the ability to damage multiple enemies and have a more interesting decision when it comes to engaging multiple enemies at once.

The floating shield provides the player with some safety from behind. This shield will float behind the players back and block incoming attacks that would harm the player from behind. This shield will disappear after blocking an attack but will recharge and reappear, giving the player the ability to quickly turn around to block large chunks of damage and play more aggressively.

Due to addition of a mini-map based on player feedback, a power up that enabled the player to more easily navigate that mini-map felt like an obvious addition. This compass will show the location of the boss room and an in-castle shop but will not show all rooms in the castle at once. This will help the player navigate towards key destinations but ensure that the player has to continue to explore the castle.

Level Design

The level design for this process revealed a major flaw in our prefab creation. Prior to this week the levels were being made by our level designers and I would check the layout. One step that I neglected was to check the prefabs that were being used to create the level. Our prefabs were made inconsistently from each other which caused them to not adjust properly when new textures and meshes were introduced. Not only that, but some of our levels had some scaling issues where instead of using multiple prefabs to make walls, walls were stretched out. Our levels were completely broken and needed to be entirely rebuilt. Thankfully our level designers were quick to fix up the levels and get them back into a functioning spot.

This process taught me a valuable lesson about having level designers make their own prefabs. In order to ensure consistency we have switched to the level designers letting me know which prefabs they need so that I can create those prefabs for them. It also taught our level designers an important lesson about using the scaling tools in Unity.

Icons

For the UI I knew that we were going to need a variety of icons to fill both our mines and our shop. With the obvious importance of a central button for a clicker game, the player was going to need a very special and large button for its "click to get money" aspect. 

This button felt regal enough to fit our game while also being large enough to be an obvious "Oh I should click this" button. This blank version is for our gold clicker and will fill up with gold text that depicts how much gold the player will receive for each click. Other variants exist that hold icons for entering the mines, entering the shop, and entering the castle.

Meanwhile in the shop we are using two different icons. One icon will be used for items that are being purchased while the other will be used to display spell icons.

The above will be acting as the plate holding our spells. It felt important to me that the borders of the icon also held the cracks that are in the center to give a more tangible feeling to the icon. Initially the border was pristine which just didn't quite feel right. The dingy aspect felt correct given that the castle and mines are meant to feel run down and damaged. Meanwhile the below holds a much more rectangular shape as it is meant to hold large amounts of text at any given time. 

Player

We realized going into the playtest that there were still some major bugs with our player controller that was causing issues with the player taking damage and dealing damage. This has since been fixed, but it did cause some issues with our most recent playtest. Thank you to all of you who provided feedback on the systems that were working and the animations in the game as that data helped us figure out details that needed to be edited.