Thanks for playing!
- It came to me in a dream (no, really, I was lying down and suddenly a design for the dialogue UI hit me and I just had to get up and immediately start working on it)
- It's really unclear, but the tutorial works on a timer and a counter. I figured some people would get stuck on certain parts, and I didn't want to softlock them too hard. Basically, it's something like attack 4 times or auto-progress after 30s. It's been a real struggle designing a tutorial for this game. Jumping is really strong and versatile, and I haven't made any anti-air moves yet.
- Not sure about the long jump, but I do need to limit how the jump works. In the hub level, it's possible to just jump straight up a vertical wall by spamming.
- There's a lot of set up in that level that needs to be redone, so most likely I'll rework the entire level at some point.
- ^, it's really problematic lol
- Unity's settings only allow for VSync or target frame rate, not both together. I've considered merging them into the same drop-down, but I think that would just be more confusing. Maybe disabling the FPS dropdown could be a better way to communicate this?
- Known issue, will fix in next patch
- Louise has always been weak to feet (unintentionally). It might get fixed when I do another pass at her AI later, but I think it'll stay in some form as a weakness for players to exploit. She is only the first boss, after all, and the other bosses won't be as kind.
- Good point, but it's somewhat placeholder at the moment so I'll change that when I replace it.
Yeah, it's a bit too much. I can't consistently beat the game in one continuous try myself, so it's going to need more balance changes. Some of these problems are a result of having a very simple behaviour tree that just throws out attacks, so that behaviour of running up is something that I'll fix by changing the AI paradigm. However, my successful runs on each boss are usually around 3-4min, so I don't see much issue with the current HP amounts. (Sometimes, I even feel like they're too low...). Damage from the bosses is high, but it's not enough to outright kill you in one shot (maybe unless you get caught in Nia's Fan Dance), so I might just increase the heal charges instead. 5 was an arbitrary number to begin with, and there were also plans to be able to fill it up mid-fight which I never got around to doing.
At most, I might have to implement an easy mode, which I'm not keen on doing in the full game, but it might be necessary for demos.
I've never played KH, but I've heard Revenge Values mentioned to me about this game before. I've seen a bit about it, but I'll need to spend some more time thinking about how to design and implement it. The 4th hit of the normal attack combo is also something I rarely use, but other abilities are planned to allow that to be used more often. Just like how you can do a Dodge -> Dodge Attack -> N2, I'm planning to have other abilities that chain into later normal attacks as well.
Personally, I don't want this to be a game where you just wait for one single attack, deal with it, then unload the exact same actions every time. Especially since the bosses are all similarly human-sized with flinchable poise instead of giants that can't be staggered by regular hits. My biggest criticism of Sekiro was that there's very little need to use the full moveset beyond the basic actions, so I'm aiming for a game that almost requires you to understand and use everything available to you.
Ideally, this would be attacking, getting deflected, knowing that the attack combo isn't going to work and immediately switching to another move, but the current animation lockout giving a frame disadvantage of ~0.5s really kills that flow. AI learning rates might also be too high that deflects happen too often, so I might just cap it at 90% chance to block and test that out.