Spells and status effects.

I finally got around to allowing the player to manually activate skills/spells. There are up to two rows of buttons across the bottom 5/6 of the screen that show the current selected character's skills. The appearance is not yet finalized, but the basic information is there: if the skill is available for use (enough mana/cooldown/reagants), the buttons are outlined. Otherwise, a pie animation (and numbers) show the number of frames remaining for the cooldown to expire. I took special care that dragging (swiping) across the buttons does nothing; the player has to specifically tap a button to use the skill. This prevents accidental use while trying to move the character.

Spell buttons with cooldown remaining. Also, some frozen snakes.

I added a new spell: freeze. As you can probably guess from the picture, this freezes the target in a block of ice, paralyzing it for a certain number of frames. The target is still vulnerable to damage, and in fact, has a small chance to be shattered from melee damage while frozen.

Special attack effects. Had to get this from a video due to my poor reflexes.

It is also possible for the snakes to poison the player's characters. The poison does a small amount of damage randomly over time, until it wears off (randomly). I plan to make a lot of these currently random or arbitrary numbers (poison damage, duration, ability to be frozen, shatter chance, etc.) dependent on stats and resists, when those are implemented. I do promise there will be no boss monsters that are simply "Immune!" to spells for no logical in-game reason, because that's dumb.

NPC conversation UI.

I started working out the UI and mechanics for NPC conversations. Like the rest of the game, nothing revolutionary here. Standard dialog tree/state machine based conversations. Since it's just me working on the project, I'm not going to waste any time writing a scripting system or anything. Everything will be done in C with macros and simply compiled into the executable. This will also make it easier to wire (hack) in special cases for conversation choices triggering other things happening in the game.

Preliminary UI for NPC conversations.

Right now, NPCs just stand around, but I eventually plan to add schedules.

New tileset.

I've also been busy working on a lot of new tiles; I really want a lot of varied environments to explore. Here's one that's turning out pretty well, I think.

Guess the game that inspired this one for 10 points.

Thanks for reading (or just looking at the pictures)!