Since the prototype, I've begun working on the game's art. I'm using the one and only MS Paint as my software for character art. The biggest concern for my the short scope of the dev cycle is clarity and feel vs. time constraints. The choice I am making is, instead of animation for character actions, each animation will be the keyframe depicting the climax of the action (eg. the impact of an attack, the raised shield of a block) with each keyframe being its own drawn sprite. I can then have the battle manager script control which sprite is to be displayed for the player and enemy for a given action.

For environmental art, I will be using a free asset pack from the Unity store named RPG Poly Pack - Lite by Gigel. It has everything I'd want to for my vision of the game. It includes simple set pieces, included foliage, cottage-type houses, and wooden and ceramic furniture. I was specifically seeking a low-poly pack with an array of common, simple, versatile items, and that's what this pack is. If I find myself in need of other set pieces, I can easily produce them for myself with Maya or Blender, and I will not need to devote much time or effort to match the style of the asset pack. One thing that I hope players find emergent engagement in is the 2.5D aesthetic with 2D characters in a 3D environment. It is not itself unique, but I hope the style differences will come across as unique, charming, and stylized.

At the time, of playtesting, I did not have the sprites incorporated in the game. They were presented as standalone files. From that perspective I was not really able to test for feel in any dynamic sense, so getting the animations set for the beta is a high priority. However, testers did say they expected the art to work well for the game, but they would reserve full judgement until the art had full implementation and functionality.

Since the paper prototype, I have been tweaking the values of stats buffs for moves. Especially relative to stamina cost or effect length, the buffs provided by certain moves were significantly strong or weaker than others. During the drafting phase for the paper prototype, there was not yet an established sense of how much effect a given move should have, leading to inconsistency with the power of actions the players can take. Especially, if an overpowered move were to increase dodge or decrease accuracy, that would slow down the pace of combat dramatically, since neither side could ever land attacks - as much as I intend to stress a high dodge chance, I would never want the dodge chance to be greater than 95%, such that a character is functionally invulnerable. The general conclusion will be that all stat effects will, on average, be decreased, such that the effects of any single stat could not fully overwhelm or negate any other action - eg. instakills, 0 damage hits, 100/0% hit chance, etc.