Swing the sword, climb the mountain

While playtesting the game lately, I had noticed that the combat was bit boring, so I decided to try different approach. Instead of relying to automatic melee based on weapon speed, I set up an action based melee system. So now you need to “swing” the weapon yourself, by pressing the quickbar slot (  I will  also add keyboard support to the system later).

The combat is now much more dynamic and game feels much more responsive.  There still is weapon speed calculation, since once you have used the weapon, there will be cooldown period, and you cant use the weapon during it.  Same mechanism is applied to spells, potions and so on. Once again, I didn’t invent this, but just lended the idea from other games.

I have been working with the outdoor maps lately. I created a cliff  graphics, by modifying lostgarden.com free graphics.

So now I have hills, which give good gameplay possibilities in level design. Here are few screengrabs:

Here is a test level with some gates and mushrooms. I know the visual style of backgrond textures and items are not in perfect harmony, but thats just something I have to accept right now. I’ll polish everything once I have time (probably when I retire…).

Here is another picture, showing hill tile with water. I have just activated the Emerald Ring, and you can see the spell effect (the pink disk on ground) and those slimes are geting some serious damage.

Having hills and water will make level design much more versatile,  so Im pretty happy about this progress =)