1- How do people feel about doubling up on controls? The file above also takes arrow keys for movement, and if someone wants/needs to aim in analog they can just grab the mouse.
2- I totally agree about the fatigue of holding down LMB. Two solutions a) keyboard map move-to-mouse b) toggle move-to-mouse
3- I’m positive the final game is going to have button mapping. I’m just not positive about the default setting. I figured click-to-move would he adjacent to stuff like Diablo, but I guess that won’t be the optimum KBM experience
The controls in the demo feel momentum-y and inexact; they sort of remind me of Getting Over It, actually.
And while you can eventually control Getting Over It rather precisely, I don’t think it works in a game where the main mechanic isn’t a control gimmick.
Diablo works a lot differently since you have a pointer and can click where you want to go rather than always moving relative to your character. There’s less of a learning curve and guesswork involved because everyone knows how to move a mouse cursor. Also, it seems a little counter-intuitive, but clicking rapidly (as you would in Diablo or Dota or League of Legends) feels a lot less fatiguing than holding the button.
No harm! Most of my game development is on hiatus because I’m in school right now. I really need to figure out how to organize my life to get a project done.
Understandable, @anothergod. It’s hard to deal with personal projects when school is in session. It’s a pain I know all too well. I wish you the best of luck in your attempt. May it go better than my attempts did.
Frankly, I think it will. You already know what you’re doing vis-a-vis game dev, so I have confidence that you’ll be able to find time and enthusiasm, or at least plan your actions for when you finally go on a break from school (this is probably the course of action I would recommend).
A lot of my problems with planning personal projects derived from the fact that I never actually knew what sort of infrastructure I could use to make a game. This led to me having abortively stupid ambitions like wanting to make Tetris in IA32 ASM with MASM (terrible, awful idea).
Either way, good luck with the schooling. May it not stress you out too badly (that was my other problem, I became apocalyptically distressed by school).
I’m in school right now and I will be for at least 3 more semesters (more like 4). So… I’m actually reworking this again. Slowly? Anyways.
The first thing I’m redesigning/reimplementing is the item system. I want people to use more utility items. I want utility items not to have to be “as good as” a repeatable item.
Previously, different characters had set speeds and numbers of items they could carry. Essentially every item had the same “weight” as every other item, and every character was locked into the number of items they should carry for max efficiency. I ended up with many characters that were the differentiated only by having more items to carry and just moving slower than other characters. I am now going to make it so that every character has a speed value that is decreased as the weight of the items they are carrying increases.
The buttons will be relatively the same:
Left Analog to Move
Lb = Strafe/Guard
Lt = Plant
X, Y, B, Rb, Rt = Item Buttons
A = Dash/Jump
The 3 face buttons and the 2 right shoulders are the buttons you can assign items to. This is the same as the most recent versions of TMF. The plant button and the dash/jump buttons are the same, too. It’s just the strafe/guard button that is new.
I’ve decided to have a dedicated button for strafing. Having to dig around to find your shield is terrible, and since blocking locked your direction, it just makes sense to combine it with strafing. This also lets me have unshielded parries. I’m also trying to work out the design for 2h weapons to block, but I’m not sure yet.
Any items in excess of 5 items will be stored in the Right Analog. Tilt the Right Analog to rummage through your bag. The angles of the analog are divided into as many sections as you have items, and the current item will be visualized above your player. You can press an item button to assign that item to that button (swapping the current item to the bag), or you can click the Right Stick to drop the item. There will be one “empty item” spot to unequip items to. While standing over a dropped item you can press an empty item button to equip it to that button or you can click the Right Stick to put it in your bag. I think it’ll be really cool for players to drop gear they’re not using to get a speed advantage.
I did a mock-up of the character select card. It had to shrink it from something like 20k pixels to 8k, add more information, and generally be less ugly. I think I got there?
vs
There were originally four constraints on the player. The constraints were health, magic, speed, and carrying capacity. Except for extreme edge cases, hit points and items carried were about equal in value to two points in speed or two points in magic. This lets me do some math and collapse the constraints to just Health, Carrying Capacity, and items.
Speed is dictated by how close you are to your maximum Carrying Capacity (clamped between 0 and 5) and items can dictate how much Health or Magic you have. If I translate the old Knight’s Sword into a Longsword here, I can make the Longsword’s weight ~2 units and have about the same effect. The cool thing is that even though I equated each “carrying unit” to 1 speed or magic, I also have them broken down into 3rds. This essentially gives me a 6:1 utility ratio for the smallest items or 6:1 utility difference between items. A sword might be very slightly worse damage than another sword, but it might also be 1.67units vs 2.33 units, and you can pick up some tonics for the difference? If you are juggling a lot of items it might not be worth it, but… if your’e not? If you’re good at dealing with items? I’m interested in these questions.
I think I’m going to come up with some interesting items. I think “cheap” items with utility drawbacks might be cool. Potions might be light and easy to drink, but maybe they take a while to recover health or they slow you down for a while after you use them? Or maybe they make you suceptible to certain kinds of damage?
There’s also a new thing I’m excited about I’m calling magic attunement. Some items might confer a magical attunement. Attunements can do things like increase the efficacy of certain spells or potions. I think it’ll be cool to make things like magic extra behind the scenes complicated. A rabbit’s foot might attune you to nature spells which means that you are less susceptible to turpentine or fire? Or a skull might make your hex spells more powerful? At first I made the runes encircling the player as a cool design, but I think it’s actually a really good way to make more differentiators.
This is how the character selects for 2 players. Each player can choose from a character from a lineup. It’ll have silhouettes of each of the core heroes and you just press left/right to select them. If you select all the way left you go to a “create custom” section and if you go all the way right you start scrolling through a roster of locally saved custom characters.
Once three or more players join it’ll automatically shrink the roster to 50% and allow up to eight players across the bottom. For these last two screens the game test will alternate between, “PLEASE SELECT YOUR CHARACTER” and (unless there are already 8 players) “MORE PLAYERS CAN JOIN”
If up to four players are split between selecting characters on the roster and creating custom characters, then it’ll show both the roster and the armory. At this point the game text will add “PLEASE SELECT YOUR ITEMS” into circulation.
If the armory needs to be shown with five players then the roster will go away completely. You can still push left/right to cycle through the characters. I want to also bring back the angled inventory. I think it’ll only be available for 4 cards split on the left/right, but we’ll see what happens.
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