In the past month, our designers spent quite some time conjuring up a large amount of collectible items: Potions, armors, swords, staffs and bows. As a result, I spent this week making adjustments so that weapons and shields could be changed as the player picked new items.
As we animate our characters with Spine, the major challenge was to change the texture attached to an item slot while keeping a relative position to the player that doesn't break the dynamics of the item. For instance, the handle of a sword must always match the character's hand regardless of the size of the sword texture.
Another subtle, yet meaningful improvement made this week was the automatic generation of shadows for animated sprites. This is essentially a Gaussian convolution of the original sprite, which is made offline, avoiding the consumption of processing power from the player. An example can be seen under the arrow in the figure below:
Although we can also change the skin of swords, its mechanics is still not completed. Also, we are in the process of finishing the fireball spell, which we hope to expose in the next week.
