Soul Wand - need advice

Alo

This is a small project I have been working on. I was trying to do a Heretic version of the Sapphire Wand used by the Hexen mage. I got the sprites, sounds, and the script from the wiki; so far, so good. I still needed a pick up sprite, so I took the "pickup-able" Gold Wand sprite from GZDoom and painted it blue and silver. Looks a bit amateur, but can work.

Then I needed to make a powered up version of the wand. The hard part was to decide what. My first idea was to to a continuous fire laser-like thing, but it seemed very similar to the Phoenix Rod's powered fire so I discarded it. The second idea was to launch a slow projectile that explodes on contact and spawn five regular shots in a star-like shape or something. That would be nice, and quite different from everything in the game. But it was quite hard because I cannot design cool sprites from zero (I absolutely suck) so I had to use something like the Centaur's blue projectile, but it didn't convince me. So I turned to my third idea: I took the projectiles from the FrostFang (which I had already used in my Wendigolem) and resized the sprites to make them small and look like micro shards, something that can be used in a similar way to Doom Eternal's rifle micro missiles. Then, finally, what my powered wand does is spawn a cloud of micro shards. To make it work a bit differently, I turned it into a semi-automatic weapon that launches bursts of three barrages of shards. The projectiles look quite fine, for being a complete amateur work. But, overall, the weapon looks a bit lame.So, I would like some advice on how to make it better. Or, some help to improve it. This is what was in my mind:

• A nice sound for the shard barrages. This version uses the sound from the Hellstaff, which seems approppiate but of course can be improved.
• A modified version of the ready and fire state frames to distinguish it from the normal weapon. Of course it's not necessary, but looks cool. Maybe a glowing blue fire, like the regular Heretic Staff, or something like that.
• Improving the pickup sprite (does look a bit unnatural) Done: thanks DeVloek

I'm uploading this version of the weapon so you can take a look. Of course, the normal version is exactly the Hexen wand, so I only need to work on the powered up version.

That's it but, any advice or suggestion is welcome. Thanks!

EDIT: I'm uploading a new version. Here are the changes I made.

CHANGELOG 3/25/24

• New pickup sprite edited by DeVloek
• Code translated to ZScript, almost without changes
• Fixed a bug where random was used instead of frandom
• Appropiate CREDITS file added

CHANGELOG 3/26/24

• Dynamic lights added to the micro missiles spawn sequence
• The lights fade out when the projectile hits, instead of just disappearing
• Random Z velocity removed from the micro missiles spawn definition
• Small flow changes within the code

Here's an edit of the pickup sprite. I ain't no pro spriter either but I think this resembles the weapon sprite a bit more

Very nice! I'll be using it ASAP.

Thank you very much mate!

EDIT: new version uploaded.

Next thing I'm gonna do is attach some dynamic lights to the cloud of shards and look for some nice sounds for the shooting and hits.