The framework

I added a lot of animations and variations for the armor and weapons. The program has been sprinkled with some very primitive AI and camera work for panning smoothly across the scene. Those spells icons do not do anything yet.

At this point, this project can go in so many different directions! I keep telling myself that I should keep the heart of the design simple, and gradually add more content to support it. I am still leaning towards the beat 'em genre, which is where the player controls just one hero.

Technical notes: The background has been overlayed with a dirty texture to prevent it from looking flat. There is actually no performance penalty for doing this in Flash because the background can just be flagged to be cached as a bitmap, which occurs in memory after the first render. This also means that the dirty texture is stored only once in the swf file. Of course on mobile devices, everything is a bitmap anyways... I estimate that three screens worth of background art can be squeezed into a single 1024x1024 texture with reasonable quality.