Animations

[John Westhoff]

The game would definitely benefit from animations. In order of priority:

1. Spell casting.
   • When casting spells, depending on the type of spell there should be some short animation that plays to indicate the casting. I'm not sure if these animations should be interruptable, if the spell cast itself should be, or how casting two spells at once should work. But we can burn that bridge when we get there.
2. Death.
   • When a player is defeated, there should be some animation corresponding to how they were killed. For example, a fire spell might show them going up in flames.
3. Spell collisions.
   • When a spell collides with either a player or terrain there should be an animation. Lightning spells do have an animation, and some spells appear to because of how they interact with the game. All spells should do something besides just disappear.

[John Westhoff]

I believe the solution will be to use Spriter Pro* to design animations for these things. Spriter stores animations in json, with keyframe information and angles for the bones, so parsing these and replaying them seem very straight forward. If need be, a decent looking library exists, though it probably won't be needed.

*any other 2d rigging software would work too, Synfig might be promising but it doesn't look like it natively supports a simple output format.