Big Update

It's been a while since last update, hope it won't disappoint !

/!\ There are still some bugs and glitches ;) /!\

Pixel Art

I reworked all the artworks using Aseprite. As mentioned before, I'm aiming for a Sworcercy/Dungeon crawler style. There is still some work to do.

UI

I'm going for a Neverending Story vibe, the UI is now using a Book as the background. Each Menu and game view is a page from the book.

I want to create the same effect as we see in movies, where the writing is appearing in a bright light with the picture dissolving. It's still rough, but I feel I'm onto something.

Before:

After:

Heroes

You now can choose between three heroes

- The Mage: Waving his wand hand casting destructing spells

- The Archer: Walking in the shadow and striking enemies with his long bow.

- The Barbarian: Cleaving in half anything in his way.

In the story mode (not available yet) you'll  start with one hero, by the end all three heroes will work together to restore balance to the land of Agerath (Name already existing in other game, so I'll have to change it :D)

Skills

The shop is now a skill tree, divided in three sections:  Attack, Defence and Constitution. Not all the skills are there yet, and some are still buggy, but will be fixed in futures releases.

In the end, you'll even be able to spend materials to create your own skill.  A meteor shower exploding into chain lightning ? You name it!

During your play, you will unlock new skills that can be linked into one of the three slot ability, activated using the keys 1,2,3.

Some skills will remain as auto-fire and will be linked in two other slots.

For this build, the skills cost is really low, this way you can try most of them.

/!\ The Archer as no unlockable skills at this moment.

 Mage be like : 

Mechanics

• Auto-shoot, the hero will target automatically any enemy coming close to him, this setting can be toggled off in the option menu (ESC).
• I decided to use a combination of activatable skills and auto activatable skills.
  The idea is to have,  in the future, skills that will interact with one another. Launching an arrow through a wall of flame, will create a fireArrow dealing more damage and a chance to apply a burning effect.
• The map has a fixed size, there is no more escape from the horde !  It will vary with the story mode or maybe when a special event occurs
• Small health bar under the player, each hero has a different amount of health.

What's next ?

There are still some bugs to fix as you'll see, some skills are not yet available or not working properly but it was time to make a release.

In the next release, all heroes will have a starting set of working skills.

Creeps will be more intelligent and have special abilities, some will blink when taking too much damage or fire a magic beam at you.

Point of interest: These will be used in the story mode in order to invoke the area's boss.

I'll continue on improving the UI and sprite in general.

A bit of work needs to be done on the sound design too, it can get quite messy.

Hope you'll enjoy, don't forget to share and leave a comment, feedback :)

 https://noograss.itch.io/hoa