You caught my attention with soulslike combat. Shame its only 1 fight though, I thought the first fight would be like a tutorial or something like how dark souls would throw you into the deep end of the pool to force you to learn its mechanics or never be able to progress.
Nevertheless, based on the 1 fight, i have quite a few pointers. Honestly, getting these kinds of games to feel right is really hard to do, especially when it comes to melee combat. These pointers will be based on a soulslike style of combat rather than the typical hack and slash combat.
- Melee feels really off when you are stuck in place. There should be a forward momentum when you attack while moving in a direction. Instead you instantly lose all momentum when you perform a melee attack. Being able to spam dashes is fine (?) depending on the type of game you want it to be. It makes the fight a lot easier since you can just ignore most mechanics with i-frames, and since theres no stamina system, its something you can just do non stop without any repercussion. You dont lose out on damage if you dash too often or you dont get punished for mistiming a dash since theres no recovery time for the dash.
- The ranged attacks are well implemented. Limiting them with a mana system that you need to regain through melee attacks is a good factor, though this makes it less of a soulslike and more of a pew pew dualstick shooter game.
- Animations for everything are too fast. The boss teleports around instantly rather than walking towards you, meaning theres no sense of spacing. It spam attacks non stop and cast attacks with barely any windup animation, so it really favours the safe ranged option over melee since you actually have some room to react against projectile-based attacks. Though this leads to my next point:
- The fight doesnt feel punishing. The boss' attacks do little damage to compensate for its spammable attacks, and you dont feel like you "played wrong" when you get hit, since you can basically tank the hit and continue whaling onto the boss. I would much rather enjoy if animations had windup duration where you could react to while being more punishing if you actually get hit. This plus the above pointer leads to a very button-mashy combat system. Instead of closely studying attack patterns and finding openings for when to play offensively or defensively, its a damage race to see whose health bar drops faster.
And like what others have said, the fight has no relation to the theme. Still though, I enjoyed my time with the game and its a really solid attempt at making a boss fight. You guys should be proud of what you have accomplished. The soulslike genre in general isnt really friendly to the general audience anyways. Even if you execute it right, some will feel that the system is still bad and too punishing while others will get extreme dopamine kicks from overcoming a great challenge. Anyways i prepurchased elden ring and i still dont have any free time to play it ahhhhhhhh okthxbi