Alrighty, so what's new with Elementus? First things first, we improved the speed of player melee animations to better match our raycasting hitbox. In addition, we changed up the animation tree and trigger scripts to prevent queued up animations based on triggers from going when the player is damaged or killed. After this, we went on to work on the juice and intuitiveness of our hp UI by moving the health bars to being directly under the player as well as adding health bars to the enemies. Furthermore, we have begun developing new enemies to implement throughout the main level as well as a final boss we hope to unveil soon. Additionally, we have improved the AI for our current enemies to make their attacks line up better with their animations and to balance their attack ranges. And lastly, we implemented a menu and a control screen. Lastly, player guidance was revamped for channeling and casting abilities.
The motivation for the animation changes was to make to game feel more responsive and fluid as some actions did not correlate 1 to 1 with what was intended to occur then. Then, we were driven to move our health UI to help players better understand that each health UI element is directly tied to a specific player. We also decided to begin designing more enemies to help diversify the combat in our game and enrich the player experience. And we were motivated to implement a menu and control screen to make the game feel more complete. Lastly, we improved the guidance for channeling and casting abilities to make our core game mechanic more intuitive to a larger audience of players.
For the next stage in our development cycle, we have a couple goals. Our first goal is to polish up and implement our remaining enemy designs. Our second goal is to extend our level to fit in our final boss. And our last goal is to implement the assets we have been gathering from freelance voice actors, musicians, and artists.
