Today was another incredibly productive day. This weekend almost felt like a game jam!

So I started the day by implementing the character model and animaitons.

With the basics in place I decided to make some particles to make it look/feel better.

As you can probably see from the difference between the 2 gifs, I also tweaked the dash a bit to feel better. I love how the dash gives back a little power to the chased, and I want to test to see what happens if I make it even more powerful. The dash right now feels way better than it did before, now I gotta see how it will feel in a play session with other people.

As I messed around with the player, his art and his particles I had to duplicate it for the other characters on the map quite a bit… So I decided to take a step back and tackle another task from my list: “Making the game mode responsible for spawning the players from a prefab”. So I implemented spawnpoints in the map and logic in the game manager/game mode to handle player spawning. That way I just had to change the prefab and all the spawning/color assigning/etc would be handled by the code.

So now my characters were all nice in place, they had pretty particles and they spawned in my level as they should, but my level was still made of white and grey boxes. I fired up the TileEditor and tried to make a level similar to the original one based on 2x2 tiles, obviously it didnt'match 100% but I think I got something interesting/close enough.

I’m not happy with the looks of the level though, It was looking quite weird with the reflections from the shader so I reverted it back to the Diffuse shader. I think I might actually end up giving up on the color palette textures for this game and actually paint textures… One thing is for sure, the environment is DEFINETLY TEMPORARY. I don’t like the way it looks.

Alright, so once I had my level there the art was officially in place, I decided to tackle other tasks in the list, considering I still have the challenge mode in my head from yesterday, I picked “Making weapons collide with each other”, as that would open a lot of puzzle possibilitise for the challenge mode. Turns out that it’s extremely satisfying to bounce fists out of other fists, I spend a long time just running around trying to bounce them, it feels so good when they clash ^^ later on I might add even more particles/shake when that happens

As you can see I also added some particle effects and animation into the Stun, but stunning the other player didn’t feel so fulfilling, he stayed in place for a little bit but most of the times it wasn’t enough to save yourself. And getting close enough to a player to stun him isn’t an easy task in itself, so even as a hail mary it was too risky to justify. One idea I had to try and fix that was to make the player lose his weapon if he gets stunned, so I decided to implement that, it instantly felt better, as the hand no longer stayed put as the stunned player shook around, it gently floated away no longer belonging to the player.

This however made quite easy to recover the weapon and killed the previously stunned player. Also it felt a little weird that I come into the player with this velocity and then when I hit them he just stays into place… I decided then to add a knockback to it, both players would kind of bounce off of each other when a player dashed into another with extra knockback if the dash results into a stun. Combining that to the fact that the stunned player would lose it’s weapon and it would just be floating around, that could create a run from both parts towards the weapon. This can lead to interesting player dynamics :) To make it a little more fair to the stunned, I also reduced the stun duration a lil’ bit.

Now I’m quite happy with the dash/stun :) It feels good. I obviously have to playtest it in order to see if it also feels good to play with, or if it’s too unbalanced/OP, but I have a good feeling about it. I think I might actually have it as a melee attack in the singleplayer mode, causing a smaller damage to enemies.

Talking about singleplayer mode… with all the modularization nd changes I made to the codebase this weekend, I’m quite ready to start implementing it :) And giving how fun it feels already to run around and throw fists into other fists, I can’t wait to experiment how it’ll feel to run around a procedural generated environment killing enemies with my fists! Will probably play around with that during the next few days ^^

That’s all for now :) this weekend was incredibly productive. Well… thanks for reading \o ! Oh, and if you read everything this far, please consider leaving a comment, I’d love to hear from you ^^ I do see people favoriting/retweeting/liking it on twitter/facebook when I post it so I think someone must be reading, however it would be nice to actually read some feedback :D