Thanks for that @diplo. We’ll be using that more when we want real genuine publicity (e.g. when we finish the first round of items).
Right now we’re working on the item equip system.
The original goal for the item equip system was something that was very organic and had no menu systems. Each button on the controller was supposed to be synced to an item, and if you were to overlap an item you wanted to pick up and hold a button, that item on the floor would switch with the item you were equipping to that button.
All of that would be fine if items meant syncing an action to a button.
One of the things we need to do is encourage using heavy items with heavy armors. E.g. discourage Tower Shields with lighter armors but encourage Tower Shields with heavier armors. We first had the idea of giving each item a “heavy” or “light” designation; each armor would have a certain amount of heavy item slots; and while light could fit into any item slot, once you filled up your heavy slots you couldn’t equip heavy items anymore. This is cool, but I don’t know how we would do the menu-less system and show important information like item weight.
So I guess we can’t do a completely HUDless system?
Right now I still think that you’ll stand over items and hold a button to equip that item to that button’s slot. If you stand over that item for a short period of time an overlay of the current equipped items and their corresponding slots will pop up. Other relevant information regarding the armor you have equipped, the items (e.g. item weight, remaining uses of consumables), I suppose this HUD can be brought up by pushing start/select as well. I don’t know how to work in unequipping items into this system, though…
Hopefully this is a good start for the game. I want the player to be able to pick up items in a dungeon and fill item slots they don’t have when filling out their character.
I’m not completely up to speed on the armor vs items system, but maybe there’s a thing you can do with just like the actual movement speed of the character/action speeds of the character? Like if the character is outfitted with light armors and tries to use heavy items, that character’s movement speed is reduced significantly?
So then heavy armored characters would then move slower than lightly armored characters by default, but equipping a tower shield as a heavy armored character is essentially “free” speed-penalty-wise. Again, not sure how armor & items work but that’s just off the top of my head.
As far as more general UI design goes, there’s definitely a way to do classy UIs and still have them pretty unintrusive; you seem like you’re on the right track with the temporary HUD stuff. With AURA we tried to go completely UI-less but there were a couple things that we just couldn’t get away with so we ended up with a system of very skinny bars on the sides of the screen that fade in and out. We didn’t actually say super explicitly what the bars were though, so I like to think it added to the mystique we were trying to create with our game or whatever >_>
Also! You can totally do stuff like heavy items vs light items with AUDIO DESIGN YEAH
So if your character picks up an item and you have a generic item-equip-sound, you can pitch it down for heavy items and pitch it up for light items – if it’s something the player does often, it’ll be easy to build the relationship between the sound and the item’s characteristics. Same thing with the item being removed from the inventory – just have something where if it’s a heavy item, it’ll be a LOUD, low-pitched thud (you can even do this with different item sounds if you’re using FMOD), and if it’s a light item, it’s the opposite. You can also do some screen shake stuff for this too.
@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.
So! We’ve been fiddling with controls, and we’re here to talk about control schemes.
In The Moon Fields we want to have as simple of a control system as possible. The main idea is that there’s a pair of axes that do Up and Down and Left and Right and then there’s a bunch of buttons that sync to items. E.g. our code reads polar coordinates and checks to see if an array of buttons is pressed.
There are times when we think we could do something cool like use the right analogue stick for a bow & arrow, but we’d have to be really convinced to let that happen. Anyways, we’ve been playing with PS4 controllers and creating a ControlGet script for unity. If you are using Unity and PS4 controllers this might be helpful. Cheers.
So to practice for The Moon Fields we’re going to make a local multiplayer game featuring the majority of the items and whatnot. Ahh! Four player local multi versus Zelda. The idea is you select your armor and your items. The only thing we changed here is that the sword is usable in 360d instead of locked to four animation directions. I am unsure how to resolve it wrt Zelda, but we’ll see overall…
Thanks for the compliment. If you’re interested in downloading the preliminary demo it’s on our itch site. You need some gamepads, but if you figure it out it should be a cool way to check out the game.
I’m worried about readability, but I think we’re getting really close. The ones I think are problematic in particular are the bomb, crossbow, bow & arrow, king sword, and tomb shield.
The final game will probably have 8 more items, so, there’s that.
So we’re moving along with Combat Jr’s sequel. It’s looking very, very much like a proper Zelda style game, but things are getting wacky, so like… yeah just what we want.
The character select lets you pick a character, an armor, and then your items. Like The Moon Fields your armor determines your speed, health, and the number of items you can equip. Some armors are light and fast but only allow you to hold a few items. Some armors are sturdy and let you take a lot of hits but make you move slowly. And then you fight!
One of the neat (unintentional!) features is that you can assign a button multiple times. This doesn’t do much for stuff like swords or shields but being able to equip four bombs or double up on crossbows is kinda cool.
We are worried about gameflow. The original CJr moved very quickly from title screen to action and it repeated very fast. It was fun and ridiculous and paced similarly to Hotline Miami. This character select screen slows down the pace considerably upfront. We’re hoping that we can get people to select a character and then keep playing the same thing over and over. We’re unsure if we need to keep track of player wins? Maybe we should. I don’t know. I kinda don’t like that idea, but I’m not good at competitive gaming.
