One of the things I worked on this week was the redux mantle. What it does is it prevents you from taking damage up to 3 times the number of redux mantles you have picked up. The issue wasn't so much in what it does or how it does it but more so when should it activate and how should it let the player know. For instance if it were to activate on a status condition (say burn) should it block 3 hits of burn (at around 60 hits per second if the game is running smooth) or should it just not activate below a certain value of damage, and most importantly how does the player know when it is used up. 

As a group we decided on any damage delt takes a "block" so to speak, however the exception to this would be status conditions such as burn or poison. That was a bit tricky to get working as I couldn't remember how to use damage types, eventually I figured it out any any damage that comes from a Status condition wont be blocked or take uses from the redux mantle. 

However the more important part as I mention was player feedback. How does the player know they blocked a hit how do they know how many hits they have left. Without cluttering up the UI it is a tricky task to figure out how to do that. Eventually I thought of an idea. The ability is basically a full body shield in practice. So by taking the player and flashing something over their body that could be a good indication. Currently I use a Green effect to indicate that the player has just refreshed their count of blocks. When the player is hit the color they light up with indicates how many uses are left to a degree, blue means they have at least 2 hits left before the shield runs out. Yellow is when they have 1 hit left as a warning. Red means that was the last shield and you will take damage on your next attack.  Eventually I want to create a particle effect of sheilds spinning around the player with the count being number of sheilds so that way there is a proper way to count above 2 other than by memorizing how many hits you have left.
https://i.gyazo.com/641ed00f2c7b52945d1f72ff6f6a7866.mp4

Kenny Phebus 5/19