Air slash effect, minimap, mini-healthbars, skill modifiers

Last two weeks I have been working on:

Air slash effect (and skill):


I created these 3 versions and though the best looking when inmovile is the one in the middle, I actually decided to use the one on the right because it looks smaller and not so flashy.

They have 2 two parts (the one in the middle has an extra one for the black part). All are displayed over geometry shaped like an axe head. With that the effect has a curve that does not need to be built into the shader, and a width that a plane or a "trail renderer" can not give. I wanted the front to look sharp so it has a solid white color. There are similar effects on other games where this front is itself formed by "lines" sliding though the geometry that make it look more "ethereal", I decided I wanted a more solid and small look.
The second part is a shader made with shader graph that looks like this:


Next up, some UI stuff:

Minimap: This is pretty standard and there are plenty of tutorials to get something like this. The map background is a "render texture" hooked to a camera that displays only player and terrain layers. There is no fog of war and no map rotation and I would like to create this "map" image at run time, displaying only walkable and impassable areas. Maybe getting an screenshot of the navmesh somehow. But it is good enough for now.

Mini health bars: I am reusing my health bar script for this(thank heavens I foresaw I would need to put health and mana and exp bars everywhere and made it very flexible). There is a singleton in the GUI that hooks a function to the "OnHealthChanged" event of every enemy spawned. I am not very sure if this is good architecture, the other option I considered was the health script calling to this function "manually", and it seemed worse to have explicit references to the gui on the creature behaviours. Like, I could delete this feature tomorrow and the health script wouldn't even notice. The enemy spawner would, however. Maybe I should create an "EnemySpawnedEvent" there too.

Improved mouseover info at the top: Now the mouseover info area at the top shows a little nice the health of the enemy under the mouse cursor, along with its tier, its species' name and its level.

Both features in this mini-video:

The thing I spent more time on and which does not produce flashy videos or gifs: An improved "buff/debuff" (I call those "modifiers") system. This includes conditions on the user creature, its skills and the target creatures. It allows designers (by designers I mean myself, ) to create on the unity inspector passive effects for passive skills (and for equiped items in the future). Stuff like:

-X% more damage from basic skills on enemies of tier "fine" or higher.
-Increased critical chance for 10 seconds after regaining consciousness.
-When energy goes below x%, have y% extra mental defense.

So, very powerful . I am still not very satisfied with the implementation however, seems messy and difficult to debug and maintain. I also have to add more conditions and effects.

Finally I had a meeting with our graphics artist and she said she will have more spare time on january so we are likely to have enough assets to launch that demo on late february or march