After  a month of completing the final semester report, and evaluating the mock up, we decided to continue our work. We started by evaluating the game design and the direction of the game. The game design is pretty  much similiar with the previous design, inspired by Super Smash Bros Series and Brawlhalla, only we change some of them, for example, the health won't be based on percentage, instead we use the normal health bar, so the health bar can get in tune with the manna bar (used to determine whether player can use the action skill or not), and the UI won't confuse the player while playing the game because of a lot of form of the UI.  Because it's not based on percentage anymore, the player now won't get knockbacked as high as the percentage value, the knockback value will be fixed instead. We want this changes to make player can make use of the combo, but also the usage of the action skills to the most.

The other changes that we discussed is adding another action skill. We have decided that each character will have a new action skill called 'Projectile Skill', since the game theme is about magic casters, minimizing the projectile mechanic would lose the authenticity and the essence of the magic itself. When you think about magicians, surely one thing that always crosses your mind is, they shoot energies from their staff, or any magic tools. This fourth skill will work the same as the other action skill, it has cooldown and manna cost, except, it is blockable. You can block the attack if you are fast enough. Like we said before, this action skill will be applied to every playable character in the game, making it a generic skill required for all the magicians. But this action skill will not prevent the certain characters to have other unique projectile-based action skill,   it's just a matter of design.

The other aspect that we want to discuss is the art. After receiving the feedback, we decided to enlarge the resolution of the character, and make it to be 3/4 style pose, to add more detail to the character. We also make the back pose of the character, so the animator is able to make more fluent, and better animations.  Here are some sneak peeks of the new art design of the first two characters : 'Merlin' the Eastern rite Sorcerer, and Lahlan Haddock, the Wizard :

Yes, there will be variants like face emotions, and also hand gestures, and more.

We also are working on the other two new characters, like the Shinobi who holds the mystic art called 'Ninnin' the term that we use, referring to Ninpo/Ninja Art in our universe. The other one is a girl, an Orb Magician. Our target is to have minimum of 5 characters and 3 stages by February next year. Here is also our sneak peek of the Shinobi character, work in progress

And so this is some updates we can tell you so far. We are currently working on the code structure, and refine the animations. There are lot  of stuff going on that we can't tell you fully, but we are really excited for this project. We would like to hear more about your feedback in the comment section, or in discord server. Stay tune for the next devlog, Thank you so much for reading!!