*This post is written by Mia, our gameplay designer.*
Hello there!
With 1.0. release on the horizon we’re digging in and trying to polish the game on as many fronts as we can. A big part of this is in the hands of Will, our VFX artist, as he’s got a plate full of going over all the abilities and status effects and giving them a fresh face.
As we did not have a dedicated VFX artist before, there’s plenty of room for improvement and adding new effects to those we considered good enough as is with animations alone.
The Hand of Merlin is more sci-fi orientated than fantasy - the heroes that you select are still only human. The Mystic, for example, is not a wizard or a mage, they’re more of an alchemist or a shaman who can create these effects not through magic but through knowledge. We want the VFXs to properly communicate this difference as well.
The first thing we did now was to go over all the abilities and try to categorize them depending on 3 factors.
- Gameplay Effect Eg: Damage, Buff (damage, movement, evasion, etc), Debuff (damage, movement, evasion, etc), Movement, AP, DoTs, etc.
- Manifestation An in-character look at how the ability works (eg: physical, emotional, alchemical, corruption..)
- Animation Used
Next, we set some visual expectations on certain categories. The best example being the difference between ‘Physical’ and ‘Emotional’ manifestation.
‘Physical’ we want to keep as grounded and realistic as possible while still looking good and distinct. This includes motion blurs and lines, sparks of metal hitting metal, blood splashes and such.
‘Emotional’ on the other hand has more liberty in its visualization since it would not be possible to try and detect which facial expression a unit has (not that we show emotions on their faces or plan to) due to their size. Here the Gameplay Effects influence which color pallet should be used.
The abilities should mostly end up looking quite grounded, but not dull. We hope.
It’s the status effects which will pose a real challenge, as we need to make them stackable, readable, and recognizable while keeping the color pallets consistent.
If you’ve got any questions or are interested in the game feel free to drop by the steam forums or join us on our Discord server!
Mia
P.S. here are some gifs!
