The Moon Fields * Combat Junior IIIrd Smash

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A long time ago I read about Soul Calibur’s decision to use horizontal and vertical attack buttons. I think the general idea was that vertical attacks > horizontal attacks > sidestepping > vertical attacks while kick and guard mixed things up a lot. Combat Jr currently has lots of circular rock paper scissors type systems and I’m going to try to explain a few of them here.

The most direct analog in CJr to the above is piercing attacks beating horizontal swipes beating sidestepping which should beat poorly aimed piercing attacks. I might have to make the movement items have slower parts, but I think they work as intended now.

Shields help complicate this system. Blocking an attack and responding with a quick piercing weapon is very advantageous, but blocking is unwieldy because you have to both aim the shield correctly and anticipate the type of attack correctly — a swipe will swing around an illplaced shield. Walking in the right direction with a shield also presents the ability to close distance while also constantly changing the environment.

Jumping does a cool thing and makes this system get unwieldy. Its difficult to control and hard to turn midair, but it seems to always be advantageous to the player causing the chaos. I am thinking of having counter “jump attacks” for some weapons that jump and stab into the air before slashing down.

At longer ranges bombs and other tricky items beat shields which beat projectiles which are just dangerous in general. Double shield is pretty good against projectiles, but, man, that takes up a lot of item slots to kill your versatility.

The bomb used to be super powerful, but I think with the lower carrying capacity it’s more of a wasteful item. I think baiting super powerful items helps play into footsies and focus on space control, and rewarding successful baiting with a solid advantage is pretty cool. Forcing players to learn to 'bait" is a hard thing for me, but I think it’s pretty key to the overall game.

Anyways, there’s that. Cheers

Sword-fighting in the rain would be very difficult,
I say this as a trained fencer, as well as a long-sword user…

Ex:
Slippery fields,
Aiming mistakes,
The fact you have rain beating down on you…
Etc…(like 5 more, seriously)

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We didn’t make it into MAGFest’s MIVS. Pretty bummed :frowning:

Working on how attacking and blocking works.

Right now all attacks have a value that we call stunLength. A Moonblade stab and a Moonblade swipe have different values for stunLength. On hitting a player the player that was hit is stunned for time stunLength. Because we don’t have a stamina bar like in Dark Souls we didn’t want players to be able to just mash on the other guy. My first solution was to just stun the aggressive player with stunLength.

This was an OK solution! But!

I wanted some weapons to be stunned MORE and some weapons to be stunned LESS while also giving the shields that do the stunning a variable ability to stun MORE or LESS.

So I gave the shields a value called stunReflect and I gave the weapons a thing called internalStunMultiplier. When calculating the stun given to an attacking player being blocked the new stun time is stunLength * stunReflect * internalStunMultiplier.

tldr hitting a player stuns the hit player for stunLength
AND hitting a shield stuns yourself for stunLength * stunReflect(from enemy’s shield) * internalStunMultipler (from the weapon you used)

So the new system works as such - fast aggro weapons like a hatchet can be spammed without much recourse because its internalStunMultiplier is low, but pokey weapons like a trident can’t be spammed well because its internalStunMultiplier is high. All of this is adjusted based on shield and positioning and rotating around enemies and if you get a hit or don’t get a hit, but… yeah…

Youtube streaming at 6pm

https://www.youtube.com/interdimensionalspacewizards/live

Combat Jr is essentially good enough to be “done for now”. The multiplayer is dope AF and people have a good time playing it.


So! We’re gonna start THE MOON FIELDS.

Essentially the MVP is:

  • Multiroom Dungeon
  • Randomized things in the Dungeon e.g. enemy placement, item placement, dungeon events

So while we’re going to craft the dungeons we’re going to allow for surprises. Hopefully it doesn’t just feel like “move to a room expect something weird” every time. I want to randomize the things but not the pacing.

Dungeon events can be anything that makes the game feel different. Crafting the events will be like making new levels entirely by hypotheticals. That sounds douchey, but literally it’s just a themed ruleset that affects the game for certain chunks. Examples:

  • Enemy Waves - get locked in a room and face a horde of enemies
  • Lights Out - kills the lights in a certain room, can be affected by lighting torches or bringing your own light
  • “Curse” - spawns more damage sources around the player or debilitates the player until they find the solution to the curse

I hope that by making these things go along with the theme of a dungeon makes these things feel more real and solid in the game world as opposed to just being a puzzle to solve. E.g. A room in the bottom of a bit would make for a good place to fight enemy waves. E.g. picking up an item in a tomb might cause skeletons to spawn until you uncurse yourself by doing another thing…

One of the things I’m not super interested in doing is making the dungeons feel like mazes. As mazes most of Zelda 1’s dungeons were super easy. The difficult part was feeling the pushback that you would encounter in eachroom. It feels like you’re constantly making choices of which patch of mud is easier to trudge through. E.g. when you’re racing through the dungeon to uncurse yourself do you go through the gauntlet of arrow shooting enemies or the big heavy miniboss room.

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ISW is dead.

I will be doing a lot of planning in the next week.

oh no! Friend problems, or real-world money problems?

Suj just couldn’t keep up the game devving, so he’s going to break and do more music as his creative outlet. It’s ok. He taught me a lot about programming, and I think I can handle it on my own.

I just have to take a few breaths and organize my thoughts.

We also have to figure out how to tie up loose ends (e.g. what to do w/ ISW bank account how to deal w/ our “properties”, etc).

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Also, ISW is dead is probably going to be the new company title, so that’s one benefit.

Guys I am really depressed

what’s up???

Dang, that’s a bummer but you have their blessing going forward and you’re going to? I hope the dissolution process is fairly painless and you can get back to making this rad game even radder. Wishing you luck, fellow dev.

one time I spent 3 months finishing a game out of spite

it ended up as my most emotionally honest work, and most recognized, but

games are often better happy; your mood when working shows

I wish code didn’t turn into a mountain of every hate you felt while working on it, especially when every new change creates 3 bugs from problems you had earlier and you just want to throw it out and restart, but

if you can get in a loop of,

add something cool every week, or every other day

and stick to it,

it builds up to a lot of cool things

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It’s not even spite.

It’s like really sad events that turned into this. Suj was having a hard time for months trying to keep up with this game and his life. I don’t even blame him for wanting to do music to calm down his soul. But I am worried that he’s going to lie to me (bad) or himself (worse) about what kind of workflow he can take on, and then I worry that will be the deciding factor in the game not getting any work done on it.

yo fwiw I’m kind of in a similar situation as far as working on aura goes and I’m finding it really helpful to just do what @BustedAstromech is suggesting and take things one at a time

I also find that just the act of reorganizing my working space is weirdly helpful in that it lets me “reset” a little – I like the feeling of doing work without having it be “creative” work per se

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