The impact of attacks doesn’t sit well with me sometimes, what I mean is that I have a feeling that sometimes there is not enough effects that communicate a successful hit. Without a proper knockback on the enemies I have been relying on visual and audio effects, as well as slowing down time for 2 milliseconds. I made the time dilation smaller and after testing it seemed to look better when attacking.
For stage 3 I set the boss’ gravity back to 1, and tested it by fighting them. It did feel more natural to have their gravity at a normal level so it doesn’t take them too long to be on the ground again after the level rotates. I also made some of the attacks of the boss bigger and more menacing. It is a much more fun fight now that there are objects the player can use to throw at either boss.
Besides level streaming I couldn’t find another way to implement a loading screen. So for now I will just stick to adding a delayed image. It works well within my means and I don’t have to learn too much about level streaming, but perhaps for the next stage I will. Then while working on the main menu I felt that the title of the game was missing so I added it on. With the title now there it does feel more complete and it is starting to feel like a real game. I also made sure that the exit button asked if the player was sure, previously it would quit immediately. Just a small change that I thought was important.
The angle of the melee weapon when attacking was not right. I tried changing the angle of the weapon on the character but that messed up a lot more and it wasn’t helping much. I did the simpler thing and went into the animations and changed the key frames for the hand, rotating to make sure it was at the right angles for each attack. Once I did that the attacks looked so much better and more on target which would always be in front of the player.
While playing other games I did notice they had a very clear HUD, so I decided to make mine show more information. Now it doesn’t just tell you what power you are using but also what powers are available to you, and for the controller it will show which direction on the D-pad the power is. Unfortunately it doesn’t take into account if the player changes controls. And since the lantern is on the upper d-pad button, it seems that there is a power missing. While I had not thought about putting a fourth power, this has made me reconsider it because it does seem strange. But most likely I won’t add a fourth power to change to. There doesn’t seem to be a good place to put the Lantern input on the controller if I do try to move it somewhere else.
I updated the melee combo so it flowed better from attack to attack, and I added a sprint attack that also flowed into the normal melee combo. The attack will activate if the player is sprinting or if they parried an attack.
While I continue to refine the current systems I may start working on stuff outside game development such as creating accounts for an online presence. Building a community for the game is important, and to see if anyone will be interested in the first place. There is a lot to plan for.
GoldenGratus Games 