Posted May 18, 2023 by illtemperedtuna
Dev's been fire lately, at least I think it has been. I played the old build last night and I could barely tell any changes so i don't know where all my time is going.
Had a few revelations lately about what's wrong with the combat and how to maybe go about fixing it. I keep coming up with the same issues. I keep over designing enemies core attacks to be these annoying attacks that come in from really far away and the game keeps devolvign into this weird engagement where random things come into a certain range and just dart at you. It gets really old really fast, it doesn't feel like a beat 'em up.
In a beat 'em up enemies get in close then they beat the crap out of you, and you beat the crap out of them. Right now the player doesn't have the opportunity to just beat the crap out of things, to stun lock them and unload even in the early area. A great deal of the fun of a game like this is just being able to unload on things without too much chaos, espeically in the early game.
So what i'm going to be doing is removing mini stuns from settings within attacks and making it innate to enemies and this will make it easier to tune combat. I'm going to simplify core attacks to make them fairly tame and greatly reduce the positional effects of dashing and such, Secondary attack routines will be FAR more intense and be the thing players look out for. This is a revelation because up till now i've thought of the main attack as an enemies main means of engaging the player and being difficult, but that was the wrong mindset, core attacks should be a routine that makes the enemy satisfying to engage with, alt attacks should be the thing that causes danger. I can also make more dangerous varients of enemies that use these alt attacks more often like mini bosses.
I've also been thinking about the secondary charge attacks, I'm going to tweek the movement mechanics so the keep heading doesn't feel as janky, right now it's too muddy, you don't keep heading 100% and that makes the weaving movement mechanics wonky as well. Once the keep heading is more locked in, I think it's going to feel much better. I'll probably need to continue to tweak and tune the system, but one inch at a time.
I keep ping ponging between this notion of movement as a resource, that must be carefully managed, and then going wild and making all attacks and movements make you go fast and the balance just all falls apart. Because fast is fun and games are supposed to be fun. I'm going to play with the idea of charging giving a speed boost, but greatly reduce the speed of low charged attacks, while greatly increasing the dash value of fully charged attacks.
I'm also playing with the idea of requiring alt charge attacks to require the initial charge to be full, but i'm leaning towards keeping it as is because I think it makes the game more twitch and strategic for the payer to decide between the mobility of core charge attacks, and the potential big damage payoff of a full charged alt attack.
Whew, lots of gameplay tuning! But minimal code, so i'm glad I didn't decide on any huge revamps. PLENTY to do with gameplay, but I also want to try to do some really nifty visual revamps to the spawn systems. I believe these will really bring the room together. Having some numeric countdown timer really breaks the immersion, so i want to retool the system to have this neat visual element.
The plan for spawners: I'm going to create a list of dynamic rigidbody game objects, and i'm going to arrange them in a neat little circle around the spawn area. At game start i'll instantiate their positions and rotations, then when an enemy spawns, i'll apply a force from the center of the spawn location towards this initial location, which will create an outward pulse sending outward as they shatter. I also want to put a dynamic light here that grows in intensity as the spawn timer reaches its climax. I'll also be ramping up the visuals on the spawn effect, right now it's just a generic cloud puff, i want to have a flash and inward radial pulse with some remnant particles swirling about as they spawn in. Shouldn't be too difficult. Once this event fires off, all the shards will fly outward and land about the landscape settling on the ground or maybe floating about the ocean in the foreground. Then as the timer counts down for a new spawn these I will do a "foreach loop" of all the chunks of rock, telling them all to revert to their initialized position and rotation over time, as it reaches the spawn they will reform the orignial arrangement of the summoning circle and the light will intensify. If any fish blocks the timer, the light will quickly dim. I'm excited to see how this all comes together I think it's going to look pretty cool and be far better than the current setup that's just a boring circular rock with a countdown timer on it. Going to try to try to remember to record this separately because i think it'll be a fun little clip to implement something pretty cool.
Exciting for the gains tonight, but there's a part of my brain that thinks, "Holy moly that's a lot of tedious crap to get done." Then I think to myself "I better drink a ton of coffee" then I remember Coffee doesn't sit well lately and I'm just like, ugh. Too much thinking about not working, time to dive in.
Awe shiiiiiiiiiiii, this is an Eagles song!? I HATE THE #$*&(in' EAGLES!
I'm ALLLLLLLLLLLLLLLlllllllllllllllllllllllllllllready gone. And i'm feeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeelin'... ugh, lets just get to work.
Edit: Great day of work! Lots and lots of things starting to come together. I'm more confident than ever that i'm figuring out major issues and addressing them. There come these huge stretches where i work for weeks and weeks and weeks and I iterate and adjust and revise systems and it sometimes it feels like no progress is being made. But then I have days like today where things really start tying together, and all that work feels like it's actually going towards making the game better.
Easier said than done, but it's almost always advantageous to slow down, and implement better tools for things that feel clunky, rather than trying to power through it with more and more design. Much better to simplify overly complex crap, and consolidate variables and knobs and maximize your iteration time so you don't get burned out day after day making the same adjustments.
I'm feeling a lot closer to having the controls at an acceptable level, and various combat mechanics are in a much better place: mini stuns, stuns, combos, charged attacks. Everything gets a LITTLE bit better every day. I was pushing all the systems too far, then I gutted them too much, then pushed them too far again. I think they're closer to being just right now. Did I just write a goldilocks and the 3 bears reference? I need to get out of this f&*ing cave...
Had a little bit of a recording gaff, so only 1 hour out of the 7 of dev today, but this was the interesting bit anyhow, got the art revamp of the fish spawns started.