For sure there is much to be done; every one of the dialogs and screens outside of the main battle-screen is a placeholder. Spell casting dialog will get totally redone as it needs to reveal the amounts of mana/life needed to cast, for sure. (You can hit L and R to find out about yourself and enemies abilities, though they're not pretty yet either.) There needs to be a character create screen (to name the character, pick class) and down the road the level up screen (pick new abilities, level them up, etc). Post-battle screen to show summary of what happened. Character sheet screens... lots to do
For now, to know what a spell will do is on the website; yep, the help screens need to all go in which help on every screen (how to play, what spells do, what abilities do, etc.)
To help, when you get enough mana to cast 'something', the hint at the bottom does change to let you know, but you have to lean on L to know what spells you have and what costs are; it'll be much better when the casting dialog is friendlier.
Oh, and yeah, spell anims will go in; when blocks get destroyed by spell, they need to crumble or get zapped, and not just vanish; certainly the falling animation needs to occur more often.. spells make it hard to see what happens. ie: When spells cause damage to someone, there eeds to be some fire, or lightnign or something to show..
Still, a lot of that is not gameplay, its candy; ie: I'm working on gameplay first, so that its playable and fun; then spruce it up to look and sound better, since you can always improve that over time without effecting the game itself.
Speed is an interesting question; its pretty demanding since theres a lot of rendering (and alpha blending) going on, and the aI is thinking a lot. ie: Bejewelled is mindless -- you just pay, and play forever. Here we have an AI that works out the future values of moves, including spells, and trying to figure out what is a good or bad move for various scenarios. Not really smart, but we can't clock down to 60MHz like a maki/bejewelled clone can
jeff
Ste is working on dialog artwork this week, so hopefully after some back and forth I can have a much better spell casting/description system in place
