Welcome to the update for the month of August. Just a fair warning that this and next month’s update will be short, as I will be busy for a few weeks with non-game development stuff. I know what you are thinking: how dare I have a life outside of game development.
Updated Character Look
Last month, when I said I was going to focus on combat, I really meant I was going to update the character look. To be fair, this was a task I was going to do anyway, as I was never happy with the previous character I was using. This new character fits much better with the theme I am going for with the game, which is that the player is a digital avatar in this world.
Character Movement Feel
There were some tiny issues I found with the character movement that I decided to fix now instead of ignoring them and trying to fix them near the end of development.
One issue was that when the player ran up stairs, they would be shot into the air because of the speed of their movement. Technically, this is correct because the characters do move fast. But it did not feel right, as they were only slightly in the air and playing the “in-air” animation felt like it ruined the flow of the movement. So I had to add some quick overrides to keep playing the “grounded” animations when this happens. Now it feels much better, even though nothing has changed with the actual physics of the character movement.
This was one of many tiny fixes I made to make sure the character feels good to move around. I feel that if one of the core things players will be doing does not feel good, then the rest of the game will not feel good either.
Weapons
We are finally at the exciting part of the update. The part that I said last month I would be doing this month. In short, I designed and created all the weapons that will be in the game, but I have nothing to show for it.
All the weapons are now in the game with placeholder assets, and I am currently fine-tuning how they feel when they are used to attack and block. This is kind of hard to do with no AI enemies to test them on, but I can at least test how they look and feel in motion. I think many, if not all, of the weapons will need to be resized once I create some basic AI enemies.
Summary
I eventually got to what I planned to do this month, but due to time constraints from non-game development stuff, I did not get as much time as I had hoped. Regardless, I will push on, and next month I am hoping that all the weapons feel good enough so I can start working on some basic AI enemies and actually begin testing the feel of the combat in this game.
As always, thanks for taking your time to read this update, and happy gaming!!