Hi all,
So I'm back to work on ADIV. Having played it a bunch over the last week I've decided that my combat is just not up to scratch. It feels clunky and a bit meh. So I'm focusing on making what I have actually feel good and fun for a bit before getting wrapped up in adding additional features or content.
What does this mean? - well I guess firstly that I wont have much tangible new stuff to show for a while. However I thought the process might be worth talking about as it might have some game design decisions that people find interesting, but also talking about it makes me get my thoughts a bit more ordered.
My first point is that designing a good melee combat system is an iterative process. This means lots of playing, tweaking values of things and then more play testing. So making any values easily edited is super important, we dont want a bunch of hardcoded values for things like knock back etc. So I'm making use of variables for all values I think I'll want to tweak. Today I'm actually setting up a simple system where you can easily alter these value in game, I'm hoping this will save me tons of time as I wont need to be recompiling over and over.
The biggest thing that I've changed so far that have made it feel way better is how I handle attack canceling.
How much you make a player commit to an action is obviously a pretty big game design decision that doesn't have a definitive right/wrong approach. It effects how the combat feels, but also the balance. I know I want the player facing off against many enemies in ADIV so I've decided I want to be a bit more forgiving on this. So whats changed?
Dodge roll will now cancel out of any basic action at any point. On most attacks this even means you can cancel before the hit box has been applied. Previously it would queue this command and wait to fire it until after a certain point in the attack animation. I want the dodge roll mechanic your "oh
!!?!" button, to bail you out of a bad situation.
I've also increased the window for when movement input (without a follow up attack queued) will cancel out the tail end of an attack animation and also increased the number of frames that can be canceled off the end this way.
Not strictly attack canceling, but I have also increased the duration of the window in which the player is able to change direction mid-combo.
These changes have really made the combat feel much more lively and fun already but I've still got a bunch of stuff I want to change both mechanics wise and juice wise