Following the 10-player playtesting event at the end of January which I covered in my last update, it was obvious that there were still many things relating to controls, motion and combat which needed to be ironed out before adding more content but one of the obvious ones, especially in the context of the existing skull-throwing ability, was that attacks triggered immediately upon casting the skill as opposed to letting the character "build-up" the expected visual momentum leading to an object being thrown out of their hand. This was both an issue from the point of view of aesthetics and gameplay. It just didn't look right but it also would deprive the target of an opportunity to react and move in order to dodge the incoming attack. The attack animation is now split into 1) a build-up animation and 2) a follow-through animation and the skill casting event now happens right in between these two phases. You can see in the next image a comparison of both implementations at the very moment where the projectile is thrown. On the right hand side, the position of the character matches much better with what physics would dictate:

Another change along the same lines which makes the animation look a lot more convincing in my opinion is the addition of an explosion upon impact, both when a collision with a live entity or a wall occurs, as demonstrated on this next image. I think it really looks cool, and the fact that it matches up with the recovery animation of the character makes for a more believable situation.

Lastly, when the explosion animation finishes, it now stays on-screen for an arbitrary amount of time, allowing for the skull to leave debris behind. This feature may seem a bit like "sugar on top" but it's occurred to me many times that players really enjoy the feeling of putting a dent into the map, they like feeling like their decisions matter and have an impact on the rest of the world. These are the kinds of details that I'm hoping will add up over time and make for a more immersive experience. You can see on this next image how debris tends to accumulate now if you're shooting frequently enough:

Meanwhile, my wife has also been working on a new model and set of spritesheets for a second class the Outlander. Here's a little teaser of some of his "naked" looks taken out of the running animation spritesheet:

She's also scaled down the size of the map tile assets as these were unnecessarily large for the bird's eye point of view of the player. It's now the 3rd time we do this and each time it takes quite a bit of effort, but we're trying to keep some non-functional aspects like the total size of assets under control. On this topic, she's had to look into compression as well which adds its own set of issues. In addition to all this, she's re-rendered every animation with triple the amount of frames for a much smoother look which you'll be able to witness and hopefully enjoy if you log into the game after I release version 0.0.6, which should be due in probably a week or two. In addition we are now preparing for the introduction of equipable items which will be rendered dynamically over the top of the base sprites, and so these last re-renders are now based on the "naked" model of each character. Here is one full orientation (15 frames) for the Underling:

So stay tuned for the birth of PvM in my next update!