7 - UI improvements
This is primarly an ability based game. You're going to build abilities that seem fun to play and then use them to kill enemies. I wanted to make the UI very intuitive and enjoyable to use. For ability slots I think the World of Warcraft system is basically perfect and needs no further refinement. You just drag abilities into the slots you want with hotkeys assigned to them, and you can source ability icons from a spellbook that has everything.
I also made some improvements (marginally) to the hitboxes (player and enemy) and the goblin animations. It still looks janky and requires more layers of refinement, but for now I think it's acceptable for a demo.
After this I'll probably start trying to implement some abilities and continue to work on the game feel. I've been thinking a lot about the stagger system recently. My current design is to assign each ability a seperate stagger value (tied to damage in some respect, but with an extra layer for tuning). The purpose of decoupling damage and stagger value is to provide classes like my wizard, that may have a very different damage profile (more AoE heavy) than other classes, the ability to stagger and knockdown with playing solo. Consider an ice bolt spell for instance that has mediocre damage but very high knockdown potential - I'd like the option to tune variables like this. I also think I'll have a two-tiered system where a monster taking a certain accumulated stagger value will be staggered (animation interrupted), and if it is dealt in a swift timeframe it will cause a knockdown (long stun).
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