Combat Update Devlog: May 25


Progress on Lily's Erotic Potion Delivery (The HMA combat demo) is coming along!
First, we start where all adventures start, with a cute preggo catgirl popping out slime babies!
Er, perhaps not all adventures, but this one can with the power of slime friends!
Now, the animations are still not 100% complete, unfortunately. There's still motion work I need to do the tails, ears, hair motions, eyes, etc etc, not to mention that at base she's actually going to be clothed, but art is 90% done for the most part, and is implementing rather nicely.
I've been spending some time refining the systems for knockdown and slime-playtime, as well as starting on the slime pregnancy and birth processing.
I'm taking a lot more time with these sorts of things because I'm trying to incorporate more extensive testing and cleaner development so that things just run generally smoother, but it all seems to be coming along pretty well!
Now that we've seen some of the art, let's see... more art!
Casting Animations
This time we have 2 different animations for it here! One that's a general casting animation for neutral attacks, and a water-specific variant that creates a bubble and releases it into the ground for stuff like splash wave!
Again, these still need to be refined; the water one I'm not entirely happy with (and only have the frontal animation for it), and the neutral one still has some timing issues on shorter cast times, but I particularly like how the lightning effects give it a bit of a pop.
It even inspired me to start sketching out a sort of "cut in" that could be used for big spells like magic laser!
Not entirely sure this will pan out to work, and as it's not on the direct list of "things needed for the combat update" I'm hesitant to do more than just a few sketches for it at the moment, but I'll see if I have time to sneak it in later, it might make for a cool flourish for nice big spells.
Speaking of nice, big spells...
NEW COMBAT MECHANICS
I've been working on new combat mechanics!
Telegraphed aoes!
 And telegraphed aoes that really don't like you standing where you're standing!
These sorts of mechanics I feel can be used to create interesting combat design. Imagine having to kill an enemy fire magic before they complete a meteor cast, or taking out a slime that's lobbing watery bombs at you from across the dungeon, making other rooms even have dangerous areas that can damage you!
To properly get a feel for developing mechanics, I've been creating a small, optional dungeon in the demo. I realised that you can't really get a feel for combat design with just two maps and a single enemy, so I'm giving a small dungeon a shot!
In short, progress is coming along pretty well! I'm focusing on trying to make things run well, squash bugs, and fit together these last bits of things that are still not quite working (like the spirits system, it's still a bit of a mess!) but with any luck I'll have a proper release soon enough!