One of the greatest elements of design is actually watching things metastasize into something that could be considered a game. There is tons of work yet to do, but man, is it neat to watch systems be implemented and become a cohesive whole. 

Most of this week was dedicated to overhauling combat and character creation, with one of the most significant elements being creating a variety of spell effect shapes (EffectShapes) that determine how magical effects propagate on the battlefield. This could take the form of a beam, a wall of obstacles, a defensive slash with a sword, or an arena clearing attack. This is huge and helps build into the light tactical essence of the gameplay. 

I am trying to split the difference between tactical RPGs and the classic JRPG style of standing on the left and waiting for it to be your turn. Perhaps one day I will add multiple levels of elevation into combat, but I want things to be a bit more straightforward. 

You learn a lot from putting the work in, and a number of things have taken shape over the course of active design. I never really liked the old Final Fantasy style where monsters were portrayed in way larger and more detailed sprites than the players. This becomes very obvious when you are dealing with "human"  monsters that tower over the players even though they're supposed to be the same size. I get the instinct, but I think for me at least I would rather keep everything in scale and come up with reasons for why a monster might be huge or someone that once was human has such a form now. Perhaps it's more interesting to create situations where an antagonist is mutating into a powerful daemon than it is to just make an extra large and detailed sprite for the antagonist as they stand. 

In the short term I am dealing with various limitations as I swing between systems. As a result, I believe the very first iterations of my game will involve quite a few humanoid enemies - meaning that I have a basis of many body types and sprite sheets pre built that I can adapt.  One such use case has been my skeletons, which I adapted from my "human" sprites and then did a number of variants off of which. Eventually I will move to other non humanoid creatures  (this is a fantasy game after all), but this provides me the excuse to have different types of monsters that abide by different archetypal combat rules.