Cast Spell Improvements
Posted: Sun May 24, 2020 5:14 pm
After having a friend stream their first play of Daggerfall to me, he cast a destruction spell, got the message "Press button to fire spell" but was confused on what to do. I had to tell him to hit the activate button. He also questioned why he couldn't cast the spell, and I had to explain that he needed to cast it on a specific target in front of him. It gave me a few thoughts toward improving the way spellcasting is handled:
- What do you think about changing the message from "Press button to fire spell" to "Press Activate to fire spell" or "Press '<activate button keycode>' to fire spell" as to be more specific?
- I think it also might be worth removing the restriction of having to cast a ranged spell on a specific target. Sometimes, a player might want to aim off-target to predict their trajectory if they're moving to the side, just like how we can do this with a bow.
- Pango mentioned in my Abort Spell PR about displaying the first frame of casting a spell, and I think it would be great for providing visual feedback to indicate that the user is in a spellcasting "mode"
- Finally, I was also thinking about including the "Swing weapon" button as either an additional, or an exclusively alternative, way of casting, since it's pretty intuitive for an offensive ability to share the same button. Possibly be added as an option (though I feel we're getting a bit too many togglable options). The only issue I might see with the former is if new players are thinking casting spells are only done via Swing Weapon, then they might consider the activate button to be a bug. That means it might be better to have it as a togglable option to make it exclusively one way of casting.