YES THANK YOU FOR DIRECTIONAL MELEE! Could you allow melee weapons to have their own animations as well?
I support this 100%. Encounters with hostile humanoids are rare enough that they should be much more difficult than the near constant deluge of bloodthirsty fauna. And it would be a lot more believable. What idiots would start a colony in a place where the first animal to wander in would massacre all of the guards with ease?
I would like to see some abilities, with a magical or technical theme. Maybe a tech/ability tree. I think stuff like this along side perhaps skill points and levels will add to the rpg feel of the game
Said elsewhere but.. a good start. The actual generated monsters themselves I feel are the biggest issue over smaller adjustable values. You run into them 90% of the time so they will influence it the most. I hope they become a priority for expansion over only a few possible changes to the behaviors. Not just larger variants either. We need more bizarre types that can spawn in place of the four common ones now. It would help to capture the feel of really unique worlds.
Really glad to see some combat working going in here. I had put the game down until it could be tweaked out, as exploration and combat are pretty big areas of interest for me in the game. I like the changes in there... I think the big things of bringing the combat together will be to kick out the 'SNES physics' as much as possible and bring it closer to (but certainly not anywhere near) a box2d driven platformer. There is a nice balance in adding weight and good collision to things. Another huge things is monster attack anticipation. Dark souls is widely regarded as an amazing game, and if you look at the monster design, pretty much every attack is telegraphed, yet the monsters are still threatening. Combat would be so much better if a monster came on screen, crept toward you, went into a crouch for .3 seconds, then leaped at you with its attack coming in very fast. Timing it just right in terms of distance and aim you can smack it out of the air, knocking it away. This a much more satisfying flow than random frog jumping mobs that time their strikes to impact you, making it feel as though you do have a collision == damage style system. Having each attack require an anticipation animation, while creating more work, would go a long way in updating the feel of the combat. Another thing to help is AI that misses. Fighting a human they don't always time their jumps and attack timing perfectly, and adds some nice variation when they swing and just miss you by a hair. Having a mob jump attack you and fly over your head or swing early and miss can be chaotic and fun, and might even make the AI look clever if you anticipate wrong and run into their intentional miss. Normally I would say going with anticipation of attacks that you want to remove unpredictable burst damage, as most players will feel this is unfair, but this game does have RPG elements and you are supposed to venture into areas that are well over your head and feel the pain. Adding in a 'just in time' style defensive maneuver would also go well with anticipation attacks, timing it correctly giving you some benefit and missing some negative. A block or some sort within the first few frames of clicking a block / defensive button. This might not go with the theme of the game though and is not that critical. Still it would be really good to see some anticipation before attack routines are unleashed, this has been a staple of gaming for a very long time and I think would really fit in well here with the procedural monster creation. Different abilities could be launched with different anticipations, adding more variety to monsters as well.
Maybe I'm a bit masochistic but I liked the fact that some monsters were faster than you. You had to learn to dodge and jump. Not ALL the monsters should be ultra-fast, but some of them should.
I'll trust the one who said they weren't evil. The directional attack will help a lot, so that I don't have to use a gun to hit somebody over me when I'm using a shield. (The forum stuff was the first prank I actually laughed on today,hope it's just a prank though)
I love everything about this. My only current niggle with the game right now is the melee combat. Gun combat is maybe a bit underpowered on a per-bullet basis, but that's understandable for balance. I do have to be worried about the timing of the update, however, since even on U.K. time it would've been before noonish on this particular day... (On that subject, I love what you've done with the boards. My only complaint is that it needs roses and/or lavender, and it's missing the ads for your recommended brand of handsoap. I'm a Jergens man, myself.)
I think this is a great start! I look forward to being able to play around with it some, and see how the weight of things feels. I would really like to see some weapons animations fleshed out more to be better in line with their cool downs. Also, having the weapon animations affect mobility would be cool too! Daggers that let you dash when swinging, Hammers that prevent you from moving when the swing is finished, etc.
