Talk:Radiant Orb
Fun Fact: As the backer who designed the Radiant Orb, of its melee/spell/passive, the hope ring passive effect is actually the one that I am most pleased with, and the one that I am typically most excited about in-game. I love co-op in these sorts of games. But when a co-op mode is of the "one main character, one person helping" variety, it's usually pretty bare-bones in terms of options for the second player. So I knew that when I was able to create an equippable passive effect, I wanted it to interact with co-op mode in some way. Allowing your familiar to block shots seemed like a cool way to make the second player more impactful (while not being totally useless for single-player, although I imagine that very few people playing solo ever equipped it for more than a moment), as well as making the gameplay more interesting for them.
Once I had the passive nailed down, I thought about the idea of force fields and barriers and how to translate that into an interesting and unique spell and passive. My original idea for the melee orb was to make force field fists that you punch with, green lantern style (which would've ended up being very similar to the empire orb), though by the time Bodie was asking backers for their stuff to implement into the game I had ditched that in favor of the circular shockwave that is the Radiant Orb. I really like how it turned out, and how unique it is among the game's melee attacks. I use it myself pretty much every playthrough I do!
For the spell, the idea of throwing up a magical wall to block enemy shots and allow interesting platforming options struck me as unique and super fun. I had recently been playing Hyrule Warriors, and one of the characters there that I played with on a regular basis uses magical walls to attack, which was definitely on my mind while I was designing this - a screenshot from that was even used as reference to explain to Bodie what I was thinking about. Given that such a spell would potentially interact with enemy movement and the game's physics in ways that no other spell probably would, I thought there was a real chance Bodie would veto it, but he was totally fine with it and I'm super happy with how it turned out. I'm tickled pink at how much the existence of Lightwall has impacted speedruns and especially the randomizer - an incredibly happy accident for me.
It's also worth noting that I had no idea that Bodie had created a boss that used my orb until I ran into him in-game - when I first encountered Cantoran I was totally gobsmacked, and I remember incredulously saying to the friend I was playing with "That's my spell!" Really love how Bodie implemented it there.
Really hope the radiant orb makes it into Timespinner 2!
