Been a while since I last wrote a post but not for the lack of desire or no progress on the game, on the contrary, work has been going full steam and there are a lot of changes that have been added!

Since my last post, the amount of work that has gone in was quite a lot and at one point I felt a bit burned out, but taking a few days off was enough to get back on track.

I have also submitted a very early alpha build for a private playtest and have been working on some of the feedback and also evaluated a few design decisions in the mean time.

Let’s take stock of what has changed and what has been improved!

New enemy sprites (unshaded)

Testing the combat and the feel was and it still is utmost priority. I currently believe that if the moment-to-moment experience does not feel good, then the experience of fighting enemies would not feel good.

That means that the enemies had to be updated with better animations and with that, I also had to define all of their states so they can respond correctly to the current situation they are in.

New enemy – Orc Archer

This is a new enemy that has been added and I really like the experience when trying to fight it. It will dash away if you get too close and it will shoot at you from a far, so you have to learn how to manage your attacks a little bit to get closer and kill it.

JUICE JUICE JUICE

The hammer secondary attack now will splat the enemy against the background wall and to sell that feel, quite a bit of juice work had to be implemented to sell that feel.

Without going into too much technical details, it basically works by layering different sub-systems: tweening, positioning, stretch and squash, colour interpolation, shader ripple impact wave, dust effect and sound as well as other systems on the player side to make the impact feel heavy, such as hit-stop, screen shake and others.

I believe this now is in better shape and the effect looks promising.

The feedback I got so far from people trying the private alpha build and from posting online is that the hammer wall smash looks and feels satisfying, which is great and what I want. Still loads work to do but happy to hear that this is moving in the right direction.

Enabling Dynamic Melee Combat

One of the things I am aiming to nail down and implement well is to allow the player to swap and use melee weapons as they see fit and use them when they intend.

A few issues emerged from that. The first issue was that the weapons have their own defined animation length and if I allow the animation to be cancelled at any point, the feel of the attack feeling heavy is lost, which is not what I want, completely breaks the immersion of the flow. So what I did is I set a portion of the whole animation as non-cancellable and the rest to be cancelled, you can think of it as attack and recovery.

During one of the private playtests, people reported that the attack commitment is too punishing, meaning that the attack cancellation is working but a bit too late, making the player taking damage when they make a slight mistake. This can be seen from two angles: either communicate to the player that timing and positioning are important and that they should get better at executing the attacks, or give the players more leeway with when the attacks can be cancelled. For now, for simplicity, the solution is to just widen the recovery window so the attacks can be recovered earlier.

And from this video one thing became obvious, which I had in mind but planned for a later date – combos. By simply introducing early attack cancellation to give the player more control over the encounter, this control translates into time and that time can be used to swap into another weapon and follow up with another attack, setting the foundation of a basic combo system very early on.

Now, as to why you would want to swap to another weapon, this will be a conversation for another time as the systems that will take advantage of that are not yet in place.

Closing Thoughts

There are a lot more changes I could mention but most of them are just fine tuning animations, reworking some underlying systems to feel right so it might be better to show them off properly when they begin to translate into actual gameplay.

Work continues with full speed, as much as circumstances allow, with the core focus being CORE LOOP. Every change that is added is building towards that loop. The funny thing is that the loop is already implemented on a technical level, but it is not fun to play until the moment-to-moment interactions are ironed out and feel good, which is in progress now.

I am hoping in the next two months that there will be an alpha build that I could share on itch.io for people to try and tell me what they think, this is something that is part of the goal too so keep an eye on this if you want to give it a try when it becomes available.

Thank you <3