8 - A bunch of new stuff

I've been working on trying to get some abilities into the game, and I also wanted to start immediately working on my second class, the Wizard. The reason is simply because I want to start playing this game with my friends soon and I need some variety. I've tentatively called the melee class "Warrior", but I'll probably rename it to "Soldier" because "Fighter" sounds too much like DnD and "Warrior" takes up the W for Wizard. Since I discussed about the build system a bit, which involves taking trees from other classes, I'm guessing people will abbreviate their builds with the letter of the main class + acronyms for the extra trees. Example might be "WTaAc" - "Wizard with Tactics and Acrobatics". I want to get out of the way of having an abbrevation conflict, so I'll probably rename it.

Anyways, here's a quick demo of the character creation screen (which extremely rough for fast prototyping, don't take any of this to be a final product) and also the Wizard's basic attack, which I think is very cool.

I'm leveraging an awesome VFX pack that I got on sale to create this and the other effects. I opted for playing the cast vfx and spawning the projectile disjointed from the player position because I think its cool; as a benefit, I don't have to try to align the cast vfx with a swinging staff animation. It's lazy and it looks good; I did the same thing with the fireball ability:

In this video, you can see I'm using Unity's spacial blend feature with sound effects to make further away sounds quieter. It's really nice that Unity has these kinds of utilities out of the box - I'm used to trying to build my own engine where all these details are super tricky. I also like having the confidence that these kinds of systems will 'just work' in multiplayer.

Finally, I updated the warrior's ability with some VFX too. This does NOT look as good as the wizard abilities - I need more work on refining the animation and vfx here, but its ok for a playable prototype.

I created a whole projectile system in the game for the Wizard - I want to work on some goblin archers sometime soon. Archers are going to be key enemies in this game because the ranged pressure is going to push the combat forward instead of letting the player kite melee with ease. I also think it's nearly time to start implementing my skill trees and level up system.