I didn't expect this to be this good to be honest. Pretty good work. May I ask how the end "stats" of the prince compare to yours? Instead of health. Is the attack speed increasing or did it just seem like that to me? I am highly curious.
In fact, I enjoyed it enough that my mind has gone off kind of wandering. An expanded version of this...training the prince to deal with threats, beating out bad habits, etc. I doubt it will happen but I just wanted to mention it out of praise.
The swordplay and little touches such as how the prince basically abridged the by the book technique or even apparently more than one voice clip per command were great to behold. I have ended up with some issues playing it by the end but that is probably on my laptop.
Wow, thank you so muck!
Apart from health, the prince's stats work this way: every few seconds, the AI checks if the prince will be attacking. The probability of launching an attack depends on his attack stats (level 0 in thrust for instance means 0% chance of launching a thrust, level 10 means a high probability of choosing to attack with a thrust).
The frequency of such actions is itself determined by the prince's speed: each level decreases the time between each 'action check' by a small amount of time.
This means that if you were to only train the prince in speed while keeping his attack levels at 0, he would supposedly act often, but he would actually never attack. Conversely, if you max out his attack levels but keep his speed at 0, he will almost always try to attack you, but his attacks will be very far between (no combos).
It workd a little bit the same for the defensive stats: reaction time is the time it takes for him to select a defensive action after the player launches an attack (or issues an order), the parry and dodge levels are again a measure of the probability of each action.
I must admit that I have put some thought as well into an expanded version. I really don't have the time to develop it right now, but who knows what the future holds... :)