Hello and welcome back to another development update for my game Hero Soul.

This week I focused on the implementation of a few systems. So to start this update off, I'd like to talk more about the Burst system. After chatting to a buddy of mine about the system one thing became very clear about this new system: giving the player control over combining spells was good. However, it pretty much eliminated any incentive to use the basic versions of spells. Why cast the basic versions of spells if there really wasn't any penalty for using the combo versions? So this prompted me to rethink the system a little more. What I cam up with is what I would consider a temporary solution until I can think of a better one. Now, using bursted spells causes your Arcana to go on cooldown for double the normal time. From local testing, this solution does create some penalty or incentive to use the basic spells but more testing will have to be done.

The next feature I worked on was the combat system, namely the heavy attacks. From feedback from players and from observation, I found that players did not see an incentive to use the heavy attack over just using the normal attack. Heavy attacks didn't seem to have a place when people played and lack a purpose for existing. Originally the idea behind the heavy attacks was to cause variance in combat, in which the player will ideally sprinkle heavy attacks in to their combat rotation. So to foster this idea I did a heavy (heh heh get it) rework on the system. For the current character, her heavy attack was a chargeable spear dash. This has been removed entirely, I felt that having to charge the attack compared to the damage you get really made the attack feel bad. So, this was replaced with a more combo oriented system. Instead of having to charge the heavy, which kind of broke the flow of combat, you now instead just press the heavy and the attack that is performed is based on where you are in your light weapon combo. For instance, if you perform 1 light attack and then do a heavy you will do a spin attack like in zelda. If you do 2 light attacks then do a heavy you will perform a jab which does damage in a line in front of you. I intend to build this out for more combos moving forward. Additionally, I've added a "Strike" mechanic to combat. If you attack enemies during certain frames, you will perform a "Strike" briefly stunning them and causing any attacks during that time to critical strike. Additionally, using heavy attacks have an increased chance to "Strike" giving you more incentive to use them. I would like to monitor this feature a bit more before moving forward with it.

Anyways this has been a long post, so I want to end this dev update with the most visible feature, a room minimap. So this was added in an attempt to solve the problem of players not being able to find enemies. Now, the minimap will change from the level layout to the specific's room's layout if there are enemies still present in the room. Hopefully this feature will help players find enemies faster! Only time will tell.

That's it for this week! See you all next week for another development update!