Baby batty blockade

I've been swamped with going to studios and working on stuff for Prisma, but I've had some time to do some baby tweaks to Bala this week.  I started trying to get out the majority of the place holder art, and most of that is on the HUD.

I started by taking a render of the knife and putting a simpler spell circle (doily) as the background:

Next, I tackled getting in a new mesh for the shield.  I looked up some shield silhouettes online and liked this one:

What I liked about this is that it looks like it has bat ears and bat wings.  At first, I tried to copy this style 100%, and that didn't end up being very interesting, especially because of the size the shield is going to be on the screen.  Instead, I went wild and came up with this: 

You can clearly see the bat silhouette in the shadow, which is great!  Unfortunately, the shield doesn't start out this big in the game.  After getting the shape I wanted, I went into the texture:

The idea here is that the mouth is where the enemy damage goes.  So for example, if an enemy is shooting projectiles, symbolically, it's like the bat is eating the projectiles so they don't hit Life Witch.  It was later suggested to me that I should inset the mouth and give it a bit more depth, but because of the time constraints I'm working under right now, that will have to wait.  I'd really like to explore this more!

With it modeled, I created a HUD icon.  It's my favorite because it's cute:

Here is the HUD icon as well as the shield in the actual game:

I also touched up life bars.  You can see Life Witch's above, which is a standard green life bar set on top of a doily spell circle.  I didn't want the life bar to get lost in the grass, so made the spell circle a nice purple.  Unfortunately, there's still a bit of confusion with the life bar, but solving that problem doesn't seem to be very doable this quarter.

And here's the enemy life bar:

The enemy life bar is now red and has a dark outline.  Now the two types of life bars are very different, so hopefully the confusion between what an enemy is and what isn't is now clear.  Will need more playtesting!

That's all on Bala for now.  I'll have many more updates in the very near future.

Extra: I also tried to do a mesh for the wind HUD icon and....it came out looking like a slinky:

Welp!  Gotta fix it one day, but today is not that day.  The water HUD icon also needs some help...