I’ve been working on combat systems for spellcasting, but as I’ve added spells, playing the game’s prototype has gotten more confusing. It needs more UI.

Up until now, you could only select a single mage at a time. Since I want mages to be able to leave the castle, moving them around the world one at a time would be terrible and tedious.

However, if you have multiple mages selected, which portrait and spells will you see?

Warcraft III had a primary selected unit in addition to all the others. This seems pretty common amongst RTS games.

Since my lefthand mage frames already show all your mages, I don’t need to take up the center screen with the active group, I can instead just show the mages’ abilities.

I had this mocked up ages ago on that UI sketch, but I finally implemented it:

Now you can see the mages’ ability, and if you have multiple selected, the primary mages’ abilities are shown.

Also, since we don’t have cast animations, some playtesting friends really didn’t understand when casting occurred, so I decided to add a casting bar to the mage frame:

UI placeholders are not the most exciting updates, but nevertheless are important.

Check out this lovely druid idle variation made by our artist Blaise!

Animations like this make me glad I wrote that selection shader.