Mine Your Own Business | Slow Rush Studios

Continuing on our spell extravaganza, you can now cast Mine spells.

Mines are not just for exploding enemies! Turns out they're good for healing and jumping too. (Also for exploding your friends.)

And I added a basic player HUD so you know what your buttons will do.

Heads Up Display

I was getting a little sick of repeating the controls each week,¹ so this week I added some UI that shows the controls for each player:

Elemental summoning controls and your health are now visible in your HUD.
For example, press the Orange key to summon Fire.

Showing your player healthbar up there is one step closer to replacing (or augmenting?) all the healthbars with floating damage numbers too.

The layout² of this HUD is implemented in the most naive way possible so it's super easy to break by resizing the game window, but that's okay because I'll rewrite it later. ³

If you're on a gamepad, you'll see circular buttons instead:

Having circular buttons for gamepad users helps me notice when I'm supposed to be testing with a gamepad.

Sure, half the gamepad elemental summoning controls are in fact not circular buttons (they're DPad directions), but we can fix that in post. ⁴

Mines

A staple of Magicka is that combining a Shield element with an Arcane or Life element creates a magical mine.

And, since I don't have an original bone in my body, we can now also cast mines here:

Arcane mines do damage, life mines will heal.

Naturally, mines cast are imbued with the summoned elements:

Adding acid causes acid to spray everywhere, and adding fire causes a fiery explosion.

You can also make a fire and acid mine of course - go nuts!

Of note, adding water significantly boosts the pushing force of a mine:

Water mines have special logic to fling you upwards, and more water means more flinging.

Steam mines will fling you even higher, but require a little skill: their flinging force is reduced if you are further away from them - and they will damage you.

Water and steam mines make the hacked-in jump pads from a while ago obsolete, so I've removed the jump pads for now.

Playable web build‎

Alright, that's all I have time to write about for now, so go lay some mines:

Press F1 for help, including to see keyboard/mouse controls. Mobile devices probably won't work!

Also between moving the controls around a lot and often testing on a Kinesis keyboard using the homegrown Colemak-mod-Caspar layout, I was forgetting which button was supposed to do what.

As in: where should each player's HUD be put on the screen, how big should it be, how much can each of the elements inside the HUD stretch or squash, etc.

Either using Godot's UI features, or by introducing a proper layout library such as Taffy.

⁴

See Fix It in Post.

Except here I guess it's more like "fix it when we rewrite the HUD".

But that doesn't sound as cool, does it?