I'll be adding Shield Bashing / Kicking too very soon.
I mainly want to get the weapon/shield pickups working properly first so that I can start adding more weapon types!
Yeah, weapons will put the game to an higher level! The difficulty will be to keep all balanced each others. The success key of this game is the simple but variegate control system... adding a kick/other command can blur that, ending confused in the melee of similar games .
Question time: what do you think about of theese 2 different kind of control methods?
1st idea: Spacebar to defend, LClick for vertical attack, RClick for horizontal.
2nd idea: RClick as usual, hold LClick and move mouse to slash the weapon.
But you can already swing the left or right by just pressing the movement key slightly.
It's been done like this ever since Jedi Knight, that's like over 10 years now!
Using the mouse movement to determine swing makes the screen super erratic, can you imagine how painful it will be to watch a YouTube video with the camera being swing about constantly!
That's why I did it the tried and tested way.
For the extra moves there's only one button being used for Kicks and Shield bashing.
True, with left/right you can decide to slash from 2 directions.
For cam I was thinking to centre focus it on the enemy when LClick is hold down, or auto focusing on the nearest enemy.
My perplexity about extra moves is only about the risk to lose the natural feeling gived by the simplified handy control. Here becouse I proposed to use the mouse like handle a sword and use Space to defend.. BTW I thrust on your choices, thanks a lot for your patience! :P
You're worried about the game's simplicity breaking because of extra moves...
Auto aiming will completely ruin the whole system, the whole point is that your camera angle determines your attack, the camera is completely player controlled and will never auto target anything, otherwise it completely breaks the game!
We've been spoiled by all these God Of War, Dark Souls type automatic games, where you simply press the right button at the right time, sure it is a skill in itself but it's the exact opposite of a real sword fight, in this game it's about guarding and protecting yourself, so the camera never specifically guides you to do anything.
The enemies have the exact same health and attack system as the player, literally, they are all running on the same code,
Think of the game as multiplayer but with the computer running the other players, they aren't just bots or enemy characters, they are fully fledged players with all of the same actions as you, if you can do something, they can.
This is why the game is so hard, the AI is actually extremely aggressive and doesn't care much for it's own safety, unlike the player who wants to last as long as possible.
Each new move will be very carefully crafted in to the game, if it's done properly I can keep the simplicity of the game while adding so much more choices to what the player can do.