True story: I wrote up this whole post once before, but I accidentally deleted the tab and now I have to write it all over again. That's fun, innit?

Anyways, Fish recently posted a video to his channel where he detailed some potential changes he would implement with regards to melee combat. He's asking for feedback from the community, and as far as I can tell he hasn't made a post on this page, so I'm taking the liberty of making one. The video is attached below (and you should really watch it, it's not even that long):

My personal thoughts on these changes:

I'll be blunt and say that I'm not a fan of the click-to-attack system at all. I feel like, although the game has evolved and grown considerably since its initial version, the drag-to-attack nature of melee (and to a lesser extent drag to aim for ranged) attacks are a core part of the experience and the game's identity. It's goofy, but that's what makes it great - it's like a refined version of what Fish had in Schwing and I'm for it, warts and all. But removing that and instead making the game click to attack seems like waaaay too drastic a move in service of streamlining melee combat.

I can tell that Fish is serious about improving melee combat, though, and although I like it I will admit that it's more than a bit clunky at times. But instead of throwing the baby out with the bathwater and ditching the drag-to-swing system, I think Fish should build on it and refine it instead. And you could probably do that by adding more camera control and aiming control options for the player.

In my opinion (not super informed- I'm not a game dev), I think the simplest and most effective way to both make melee combat less disorienting is to give the option to lock the camera to its current facing at will. Mind you, I'm not saying locking the camera onto nearby enemies or changing whether it's behind the back or in front of the player, but straight up locking it in the angle that the player is facing at any given moment and keeping it there while letting the player move around with the directional keys and letting them change the facing of the Juiceling and their held weapon with subsequent movements of the mouse cursor. The WASD/directional keys would move the Juiceling around in the direction corresponding to the way the locked camera is facing, which would allow the Juiceling to walk while facing sideways as Fish was proposing in the video (although you'd be moving the Juiceling sideways with the A or D keys instead of the W key, and you'd have to make them face sideways with the mouse). It would also let the player continue to swing at things by clicking and dragging the mouse without dragging the camera around, which would make melee less disorienting and would open up a few new combat moves. Unlocking the camera would have it return to the behind-the-back angle that we have now and re-couple the player's facing to the camera's facing, and the speed at which the camera moves to this new position should be configurable in the settings menu. In this system, you could continue to drag the camera to swing your weapons, but it wouldn't be required with on-demand camera locking, making melee combat much less dizzying.

I'd suggest that you do any of this camera control stuff with the C key, since it can be held by the player's left thumb while still allowing them to use all 4 of their other fingers to hit the WASD keys. Pressing and holding the C key would lock the camera in the direction that the player is facing, and letting go would have it go back to the normal view behind the Juiceling. (You might also make it so that double-tapping the C key keeps the camera locked without having to have the key held, and pressing the C key again unlocks it. Or you could have the nature of the camera lock be toggleable in the settings menu.)

You could, potentially, also press something like the F, E, or Q keys to have the player character's facing and weapon direction snap back to the locked camera position instead of having the camera face behind the character's current facing. If the Juiceling had started to point the wrong way and the player had the camera focused on a dangerous enemy that they didn't want to have out of sight, pressing this key (while having the camera locked with the held C key or something like that) would have the Juiceling swing around back to the right facing. You might even make this a combat move if you held the heavy swing button, where the Juiceling's weapon would whip around and smack anything in its way as it went to face the locked camera position. Again, this is just a proposed idea, and I'm not sure how hard it would be to implement, so you shouldn't follow it verbatim. (I've also mentioned similar systems before in other posts, so maybe Fish really doesn't like this idea or it's too hard to implement and I should have taken the hint by now.) But I think something that gives the player better camera control, or that decouples the ability to swing melee weapons from having to swing the camera around, would make melee combat a lot better, and is at least worth considering before adopting a click-to-attack system. Also, there's nothing saying that you can't have both systems, either - maybe make it an option the player can choose in the settings menu, rather than making it a skill they have to invest points That seems like the easiest way to avoid any controversy, selon moi.