Yes, right now it's intended that the game is "target-lock heavy"where you are constantly targeting enemies. I had been wondering if it's worth it giving the combat a soft-lock system (i.e. when not in target-lock, doing an attack will turn your character automatically to the nearest enemy). Definitely worth exploring later down the road.
Howdy! First off I feel as though this will be an awesome project in the future so I went ahead and followed. I played around for about 45 minutes until I was able to clear all enemies (except 1!). Just so you know I played with kbm, but I might try and dig out my controller to see how that feels. I prefer to play souls games on console with controller anyways. While playing I wrote down some stuff:
Having all the weapons available on demand is great. I bet that in the full game, being able to choose 3 weapons to have at the ready will lead to some neat player choice and interesting strategy combos.
Consider queuing the input for the phase dash so that when an attack animation finishes it will go straight to the dash.
Phase dashing through the fences is cool, but you can also dash through the brick pillar at the spawn and that feels a little weird.
If you kill an enemy with the charged impale the spear will stay. I enjoy that part, but I would probably make the spear "cool off" if you know what I mean. Also live spiked enemies come back with a vengeance!
Showing the enemy stamina is a good choice. My biggest complaint with some of the other games in the ARPG genre is that AI cheats and has unlimited stamina.
Spam clicking LMB while not locked on sometimes only plays the first part of the rapier combo before it resets. Is this intentional so players are timing their clicks better?
Game ran fine on my machine, a 6-core AMD with a nano card.
I see the potential for tons of fun. I know that most of what I posted sounds like negatives, or stuff you already know, but I honestly enjoyed the little bit I got to play. I'll keep an eye on it for the future, good luck.
Yes, that's part of the plan. I meant it that you could easily combo switching back and forth between different weapons, but I realize I need to tweak things to make that more easy to pull off. Later on, you'll have more swords, pole-arms, and blunt weapons available, so you could mix and match what 3 weapons you have at the ready. Ideally I'd make it that each weapon has a different moveset (i.e. a Schiavona having different attack animations from a Falchion, even though they are both of the one-handed sword variety). I plan that the player could even make the 3 attack buttons assigned with only swords (of different types), or only pole-arms, or really, any mixture that fits their liking.
I received similar feedback regarding dash after attack. While I'm not thinking of input queuing, I was thinking of letting the player phase dash during the recovery part of an attack animation (I had that disabled because I think it made fights too easy, but I'll experiment with it more).
You can phase dash through anything that's not too thick, and it just so happened that the brick pillars were thin enough. I might just keep it that way. As long as you can easily tell where you'd end up in, I don't think it's wrong. Perhaps later on I could design stuff like secret rooms accessible by phase dashing only.
Sounds good, I'll make it that the fire effects die off if the impaling spear is left intact but the impaled enemy died.
Spamming LMB and it causing the player to keep repeating the first attack is not intended. I think it happens right after you dash. I'll look into it again. But to use it to discourage button mashing? It's an idea worth exploring. But I bet there will be people who won't get it and just complain that their attacks don't work.
Thanks! I appreciate that you were persistent and didn't just give up after the first few deaths. I can see a bug there where you are canceling impale into a charged attack of a different weapon, so the enemy is breaking free prematurely and your spear is replaying the blood hit effects (it's not supposed to happen). I've added that to my todo list.
Good shit. Would be nice to have the camera rotated with IJKL, as in the Dark Souls control scheme when using the keyboard, but I had a controller so it's fine. In general, it felt pretty solid mechanically and visually. Having sounds would probably triple the enjoyment. Found myself using the charged attacks 80% of the time, might want to reconsider their balance. Then again, missing a charged attack does have a huge penalty in delay, making it not worth it for non 1v1 fights, so it might be ok. The game heat up the laptop quite a bit, but I guess it's normal for the fancy 3D visuals. Charged hammer chains make 1v1 very easy.
Thanks for trying it out! You can actually use the numpad for rotating the camera: numpad 8, 4, 5, 6 for camera, and 1, 2, 3 for attacks (I assigned those more for debugging), but I guess it wouldn't hurt to add IJKL too (as some people use keyboards that have no numpad).
I had been thinking about that, regarding charged attacks being too powerful. I'm hoping more variety in enemy types will offset that (a ranged attacker would easily disrupt your charging). We'll see as I implement more stuff in the future.
Cool, i've tried to break something and the only find i've found is mashing LMB, RMB and 1 will just lock you in place unable to move.
Combat did not feel very well, but it's an issue of those infinite small tweak to the animation lenghts and stamina drains.
Having two attacks disable enemies completely seems too OP, hell, even Sledgehammer charged attacks just neutralizes one enemy completely, since you can recharge it while he's down.
Spear charge missing should probably not play the rest of the animation.
Good job on fixing all the input stuff from the last time, keep at it.
Thanks for trying it out! I'll look into that bug regarding mashing LMB, RMB, and 1. Was the player character unresponsive to move input forever? Or did you get to make it move after doing something else?
I'm fine with the Spear taking two attacks to finally flinch the enemy, as it's only a flinch, and enemies can recover from that easily. But the Warhammer charged attack does feel cheap and I'm wondering what to do there. Maybe the first pound attack only does a flinch, and only the 2nd and 3rd pounds finally flattens your target.
I'm not super worried about it though, as the enemies I have there right now are only the easiest type (they just run straight at you and attack as long as they still have stamina, and they only have a low amount of stamina). They don't have any gimmick or tricks up their sleeve, and their only advantage is to overwhelm you, but as long as pick them off one-by-one, it's easy (and is meant to be so).
"When the spear charge misses it plays the rest of the animation" is intentional and is meant to punish you if you make a mistake with releasing the charge at the wrong moment. The impale attack is very powerful since it makes the enemy immobile and open to attacks, so there needs to be some form of risk in using it. Although now I'm thinking if there should be controls for canceling/aborting a charge if you decided you don't want to do it anymore.
Cool tech demo, it looks really nice, and I can see this blooming into something I'd definitely love to play. but I am frustrated at the hit registration and don't understand why I'm missing sometimes.
It feels really nice to gate off other enemies to focus on your target.
Dashing feels so dissatisfying, because of the lag afterwards. A stamina depletion is enough punishment for getting out of the way of something, but that's just me.
I absolutely love the style, and I'm sure with some audio juice and general fluidity this will gain lots of traction. Keep up the good work.
Thanks! Missing your attacks may mean you're simply too far away upon pressing the attack button, or it could be a bug. If you could make a video recording, I could look into it.
Also, attacking without targeting the enemy can be difficult but still possible. If you want to concentrate on one enemy though, it's better to target them.
You could also try the top-view camera if you're having a hard time judging distances (press C to switch camera styles).
Stamina management is a big part of combat, so don't go crazy attacking too much since it will deplete your stamina quickly. Stamina is there to prevent any character from just attacking indefinitely (i.e. infinite combo).
Lag after dashing is intended. But to eliminate the lag, you can cancel the recovery part of the dash into an attack (provided you have enough stamina) if you time the attack button press properly. You can also chain multiple dashes together if you time the button press right.
I may increase his max stamina though, to compensate for all the new attacks I gave him. I'll see how it goes.
Comments
Great, this looks pretty, and its awesome. Changing weapons on the fly is really fun.
it is hard to hit enemies when you are not locked to them tho.
Good job
Yes, right now it's intended that the game is "target-lock heavy"where you are constantly targeting enemies. I had been wondering if it's worth it giving the combat a soft-lock system (i.e. when not in target-lock, doing an attack will turn your character automatically to the nearest enemy). Definitely worth exploring later down the road.
Howdy! First off I feel as though this will be an awesome project in the future so I went ahead and followed. I played around for about 45 minutes until I was able to clear all enemies (except 1!). Just so you know I played with kbm, but I might try and dig out my controller to see how that feels. I prefer to play souls games on console with controller anyways. While playing I wrote down some stuff:
I see the potential for tons of fun. I know that most of what I posted sounds like negatives, or stuff you already know, but I honestly enjoyed the little bit I got to play. I'll keep an eye on it for the future, good luck.
Thanks for playing!
Thanks again! Glad you had fun with it!
I did a playthrough of your demo.
Thanks! I appreciate that you were persistent and didn't just give up after the first few deaths. I can see a bug there where you are canceling impale into a charged attack of a different weapon, so the enemy is breaking free prematurely and your spear is replaying the blood hit effects (it's not supposed to happen). I've added that to my todo list.
Good shit. Would be nice to have the camera rotated with IJKL, as in the Dark Souls control scheme when using the keyboard, but I had a controller so it's fine. In general, it felt pretty solid mechanically and visually. Having sounds would probably triple the enjoyment. Found myself using the charged attacks 80% of the time, might want to reconsider their balance. Then again, missing a charged attack does have a huge penalty in delay, making it not worth it for non 1v1 fights, so it might be ok. The game heat up the laptop quite a bit, but I guess it's normal for the fancy 3D visuals. Charged hammer chains make 1v1 very easy.
Thanks for trying it out! You can actually use the numpad for rotating the camera: numpad 8, 4, 5, 6 for camera, and 1, 2, 3 for attacks (I assigned those more for debugging), but I guess it wouldn't hurt to add IJKL too (as some people use keyboards that have no numpad).
I had been thinking about that, regarding charged attacks being too powerful. I'm hoping more variety in enemy types will offset that (a ranged attacker would easily disrupt your charging). We'll see as I implement more stuff in the future.
Cool, i've tried to break something and the only find i've found is mashing LMB, RMB and 1 will just lock you in place unable to move.
Combat did not feel very well, but it's an issue of those infinite small tweak to the animation lenghts and stamina drains.
Having two attacks disable enemies completely seems too OP, hell, even Sledgehammer charged attacks just neutralizes one enemy completely, since you can recharge it while he's down.
Spear charge missing should probably not play the rest of the animation.
Good job on fixing all the input stuff from the last time, keep at it.
Thanks for trying it out! I'll look into that bug regarding mashing LMB, RMB, and 1. Was the player character unresponsive to move input forever? Or did you get to make it move after doing something else?
I'm fine with the Spear taking two attacks to finally flinch the enemy, as it's only a flinch, and enemies can recover from that easily. But the Warhammer charged attack does feel cheap and I'm wondering what to do there. Maybe the first pound attack only does a flinch, and only the 2nd and 3rd pounds finally flattens your target.
I'm not super worried about it though, as the enemies I have there right now are only the easiest type (they just run straight at you and attack as long as they still have stamina, and they only have a low amount of stamina). They don't have any gimmick or tricks up their sleeve, and their only advantage is to overwhelm you, but as long as pick them off one-by-one, it's easy (and is meant to be so).
"When the spear charge misses it plays the rest of the animation" is intentional and is meant to punish you if you make a mistake with releasing the charge at the wrong moment. The impale attack is very powerful since it makes the enemy immobile and open to attacks, so there needs to be some form of risk in using it. Although now I'm thinking if there should be controls for canceling/aborting a charge if you decided you don't want to do it anymore.
Cool tech demo, it looks really nice, and I can see this blooming into something I'd definitely love to play. but I am frustrated at the hit registration and don't understand why I'm missing sometimes.
It feels really nice to gate off other enemies to focus on your target.
Dashing feels so dissatisfying, because of the lag afterwards. A stamina depletion is enough punishment for getting out of the way of something, but that's just me.
I absolutely love the style, and I'm sure with some audio juice and general fluidity this will gain lots of traction. Keep up the good work.
Thanks! Missing your attacks may mean you're simply too far away upon pressing the attack button, or it could be a bug. If you could make a video recording, I could look into it.
Also, attacking without targeting the enemy can be difficult but still possible. If you want to concentrate on one enemy though, it's better to target them.
You could also try the top-view camera if you're having a hard time judging distances (press C to switch camera styles).
Stamina management is a big part of combat, so don't go crazy attacking too much since it will deplete your stamina quickly. Stamina is there to prevent any character from just attacking indefinitely (i.e. infinite combo).
Lag after dashing is intended. But to eliminate the lag, you can cancel the recovery part of the dash into an attack (provided you have enough stamina) if you time the attack button press properly. You can also chain multiple dashes together if you time the button press right.
I may increase his max stamina though, to compensate for all the new attacks I gave him. I'll see how it goes.