Hello!

It's been a while, over a month actually but I'm back with another update. I so happened to lost my beloved dog right before Christmas and my mental health took a bit of a hit, before I fully recovered I had to go back to work that further drained any fun from coding that I had up until this point. But I'm feeling better now and managed to squeeze in a couple of changes for y'all to enjoy!

I might miss a couple things since I worked on this on and off without really logging in anything over the past month so bear with me :)

New character

As per usual a new character joins the game: Truzi. He's an ice type time manipulating character following the path of Light. He also brings in his trusty weapon Time Blade.

	Time Blade creates a set of clock hand like swords around him, causing enemies hit to take ice damage and become time frozen
	Chronoshift allows him to teleport to his previous position while getting rid of all de-buffs currently present on him

His skill 

Fun fact: It took me forever to settle down for his kit and that's not even and exaggeration. I had him in my head even before Lucy have been released. In the end I decided for something simple since I got skill issued trying to implement any actual time related abilities... So as much as I'm fine with him now, his kit is kinda the result of me just giving up~

New abilities/items

I decided to add a couple items that would enable different playstyles, this time around I focused on damage over time that  should help Natalie and other characters to utilize this type of gameplay better.

	Lasting Poison increases the duration of all damage over time effects
	Crown of Thorns increases the damage caused by all types of damage over time effects
	Rapid Infliction increases the frequency at which damage from damage over time effects is being triggered
	Shiny Necklace increases healing received from any source
	Fire Ring creates a ring of fire around a character causing burn (fire damage over time effect) to all enemies that come in contact with it
	Light Pillar summons pillars of light in an area causing light damage and healing on hit
	Pillar of Despair summons a pillar of dark energy onto the battlefield, draining character's HP in exchange for higher damage

all of these abilities are available after meeting certain criteria. 

Systems

Next to allow for more interesting type of scaling similar to Truzi's cooldown reduction to damage conversion or pillars of despair scaling with HP. I rewrote the part of code responsible for overall stats calculation. It's more of an under the hood type of change but cleans up the code quite a bit and allows me to experiment with something more than flat stat increases.

VFX

A new VFX system have been implemented, only new weapons and a fire ball are currently utilizing it. Regardless it is good news since now I can easily implement different attack animations following timing principle (anticipation -> release -> dissipation).

So look forward to other weapons (and skills) getting the much needed upgrade!

UI improvements

If you collect character shards it's often very difficult or impossible to figure out what these even do without opening the shards screen, then you close the window and already forgot what it was that you just got. Fear not, here is the change for you. Improvements from shards will now display directly on the character screen:

There is some work to do with color coding tho!

Minor changes

• Boss shard rewards will have a much higher chance of containing better rarity upgrades
• Nishi's special caused quite a bit of lag when triggered on a large number of enemies so the number of flames triggered by his special ability have been toned down
• Sometimes stats visible on the ESC menu overflown into a new line
• Expanded stats that can be improved by Amelia's glass shards

And that's it! I'm not entirely sure what I will tackle on next since there is still a whole lot left to do so stay tuned for the next update. 

As always, feedback is much appreciated!