Skill animations, short trailer

Today I'm talking about skill animations, last post I talked about the final summon roster.

I was working a long time on special effects for all the skills. The game has 327 unique skills right now and about 300 of those have unique animations. There's also quite a few other incidental effects, like different types of slashes and hit effects, as well as a death animation and enemy swings. For a better idea of what 300 looks like, here's part of my skill checklist I've been using to keep track of which effects I have implemented:

http://i.imgur.com/WK0x2.jpg

And without further ado, here are some special effects in Unity:

http://i.imgur.com/viJ1C.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/nR6UH.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/yeiS2.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/Fl2Ef.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/7b9t1.jpg

I also did animations to indicate whose turn it was, and who was being affected by buffs and heals. Before making the game, I didn't realize that the player needed so much feedback. I had to do research when I started getting playtest feedback that the battles weren't clear enough to know everything that was going on.

I also just finished working on the short version of the trailer, so you can see some of the effects in action there.

Ways of Minimizing Risk

Like I said before, there are many obstacles in the path of a single developer finishing and shipping a game. So I thought I'd do a post about what I'm doing to mitigate that risk.

• Using a pre-made engine: Unity
• Using middleware: Orkashi RPG Kit
• Using a unique art style
• Chose to do a relatively easier to develop game structure
• I decided to do a dungeon crawler, which I love, but also doesn't require as many unique art assets as an open world. 
• Easier to be creative within constraints
• Finding ways to minimize animation
• First, animation is time-consuming. 
• Second, it doesn't contribute as much to the world/gameplay for the time it takes to do as many other tasks that are faster.
• Using sprites instead of full 3D models
• Focusing on digital distribution
• Rather than focusing on finding a publisher or investors to fund a large scale physical distribution and advertising campaign, I'm going to try crowdfunding and releasing in a digital format.
• Developing with a harder heart
• If I cut features that are close to my heart when I see them taking too much development time, or that they're making it less fun, the game is that much more likely to succeed.