Human! You are about to become a sword robot! · By
Now the game is a lot of fun but there is one thing that I find a little bit annoying. I dislike the whole a/d lmb to side swing. I never liked it in games since it always feels clunky and unresponsive. I would suggest making the rmb doing a side slash and shift rmb making the slash in the opposite direction it would make it feel much more fluid.
Thanks for the feedback!
Getting the controls to feel right have been one of the trickiest parts of development so far.
I think there are a few things to try to optimize for:
Most people seem to master it pretty quickly, so I'm probably not going to change the defaults.
That said, remapping controls is a commonly requested feature and will likely be included in the next update!
It should support remapping to the combination you propose, but don't be surprised if right click and shift are already mapped to other exciting new features. ;)
They use wasd to control attack direction like your game, just a bit more complex. I believe attacking while moving away produces a thrust rather than a overhead attack, while blocking is manual and bound to right click. You should also look into Chivalry: Medieval Warfare and Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy if you haven't played them before. They both did great things with mouse & keyboard melee combat. Jedi Academy in particular has a great system for activating special moves that could work well in Clone Drone.
Jedi Outcast is where much of the inspiration comes from. :)
Jedi Academy expanded on a lot of the things with dual wielding / two handed darth maul things, but I liked the purity in Jedi Outcast better. The deliberate timing of the heavy stance rather than the chaotic flailing of the faster stances made for some really powerful play.
All in all I much prefer blocking as an automatic thing, even though many people are used to pressing a key. Since this game actually respects where you hit, it's harder to make a block that just shields you all over. Whenever you change your stance to block you're actually opening up some other area of your body to attack. A standard move in kendo is to feint to make your opponent block an overhead cut, then switch your cut to the wrist or stomach. Maybe that could be a fun thing to play with, but not having to worry about it leaves the player with more brain space to do other things. :)
Heavy Stance is the best stance. :] Even in this early state, clone drone already feels like a Jedi game. The physics are very similar, I would love to see some more movement options. Outmaneuvering enemies was one of the most satisfying parts of Academy.
I definitely agree the auto block is better suited to this game, although I'm not sold on the easy arrow deflection. I feel like there should be a limit to how many arrows you can block in a small time frame, or perhaps the arrows should unbalance you like sword strikes?
Do you plan on adding other weapons? I wouldn't want to see anything as abstract as dual wielding; but things like spears (replace overhead attack with thrust, smaller hitbox, no arrow deflection) , sword and board (significantly less stagger on block, limited reach, maybe shield bash instead of kick?), or heavier weapons like a warhammer (very slow, lots of stagger or even knockback on block). This game has so much potential, really excited to see where it goes! :]
yeah, arrow deflection is kindof OP right now. Once I have more abilities I can make all of them OP and give you lots of interesting choices as to what thing to play with. :)
Will probably introduce more weapons, but haven't nailed down which ones yet. Lots of things might start as an enemy only weapon, with the possibility of the player getting it later. Requires some experimentation to figure out what the best answer is for this.
Yes. Sometime in 2017 once it is a bit further along. Since most of the revenue tends to come from Steam I want it to be as good as it can be before launching there.
Small note: When it launches on Steam it might be more expensive than the current price, to reflect its increased awesomeness.
If you buy it now you automatically get a Steam key when it launches. :)
