@spacetown I really appreciate you bringing up sound design to help this along. I think that will be a helpful addition.
We’re going to be adding shields. Initially we didn’t want shields, but I think it will be a better design overall to include them.
We’re going to have at least two shields. First we’ll talk about our initial design of implementation for using shields. Then we’ll talk about possible examples of shields and ideas for them.
###Shields
Shields are different than most other items. You assign the shield to a button like other items. But unlike other items you hold down the assigned button to keep the shield out and release to pull the shield back in.
We want to do a few things with shields. One we want to be able to lock the player direction and strafe with the shield facing one direction. Two we want to be able to allow the shield to rotate along with the player. We also want the heavier shields to have a charge manuever where the shield rotates down from above the player and smashes the ground to attack and push away enemies.
We have two solutions to the strafe and rotate controls. The first solution is that light shields rotate while heavy shields strafe. This is going to be simpler for the player to understand and makes each shield useful in its own way. Another thing is that lighter shields will most likely not give a max speed drop whereas heavy shields will cap the max speed in addition to lowering movement speed when deployed.
The second solution is that pushing the shield button and then moving will be a strafing motion, whereas moving first and then pushing the shield button will let the player rotate the shield. We also had the idea of having a charge dash move attached to the light shield, but we’re unsure of that.