Game Journal #92 - Just One More Thing (Patreon)

This week I had planned on finishing up the comic page I had in the works but when I opened up photoshop I paused and thought, you know....  if I had one more week on gamedev I can knock three big items off my to-do list and be done with it.  Jason has been out of town this week and we're planning to make a big update push soon, so I figured if I take this week to just wrap these things up I can be available to help with the work push instead of waiting to build assets.  Since I'd planned on doing a comic this week and I didn't I'm opening this post up to comic friends.  Sorry!!!  But also, please enjoy today's workshop post.

We've got a kanboard set up for our workflow and we have all our pending tasks marked as color-coded items, so I've been picking out art items off the top of the list to knock out and move into the "done" column.  Last week I completed the last assets to fill out the undead enemy faction, so we have our AI adversaries all animated and ready to go.  This week I wanted to pick out three items that we didn't really have good substitutes for so make sure all our bases were covered in the future- hitsparks, backdash and emotes.

Over the time we've been working on this game we've ended up rebuilding it "four times across three engines", as Jason put it.  We have a solid mechanical foundation for how combat works, but we hadn't had the assets to visually sell the impact of dealing damage.  We as the developers knew that hits were being registered successfully but we need a way to convey it to players, to confirm absolutely that a) a hit was registered and b) damage was dealt.  To do this I made some hitsparks- I actually had a few assets for them in the archive but they were just white pencil line sketches, and since I want them to really pop in the pencil sketch game build I decided to redo them to match the color of the bullet sprites.

On the left is an updated version of the original hitsparks- just a burst of jagged shapes pointed away from the direction of impact.  I made three variants with three to five jagged points on them for visual variety, they were originally meant to be universal for melee or ranged hits but I thought they were better suited to ranged impacts, particularly when the bullet impact sprite is applied on top of the enemy sprite.  I decided melee hits deserve their own kind of hitspark, which I drew on the right.  I chose a big X shape, with one bar thicker than the other, so that it could visually center the impact on the character, rather than convey the damage passing horizontally through them.  The big jagged X also makes sure that some arm of the impact sprite stick out around a character's hitstun animation- I drew three variations of the X with the thick bar pointing at different angles to help sell this variety, and a mockup of them in action gives a pretty good oraoraoraoraoraora feel: 

In our game rules "ranged" is defined as a long, thin line and "melee" is a shorter, horizontally-sweeping arc, so having bright orange sparks in our combat demos should help differentiate the damage patterns between the two weapon styles when applied to a crowd. 

I think I mentioned a few weeks ago about how Jason and I approach our character moveset.  The attacks are more or less done, we have a tool planned for the uses we intend a player to be able to find and there isn't really a lot of room for new attacks, so when we (I) propose a new move we have a vigorous back-and-forth to be sure it's a worthwhile inclusion.  Two of the animations we settled on including are backdash and emotes.  Like the strafe animation from the other week these are non-attacking movement options, meant to supplement combat and make the experience feel more complete and good.  I'll go through them real quick in order.

Backdash ended up being Jason's suggestion.  We were talking about, oh what was it, I think it was how the ranged moveset needed a way to make space, since it was real easy for melee to close gaps and do melee things.  We have a shortcut built into our core attack combo where if you input a ↓↘→ quarter-circle forward motion and attack you can cancel the core attacks into your dash attack animation, which lets you do combos and then launch yourself forward to clear out enemies in front of you and reposition.  Our plan is for dash attacks to have some early invincibility to ranged attacks, so if we have an enemy who shoots at you from far away you can dive through the bullets and get close to them.  We didn't really have a corresponding option for ranged, where you can make more space to get away from melee enemies who got close to you, and a suggestion about putting something on ↓↙← quarter-circle back was made.  This idea became the backdash animation.

The idea of a backdash is it's a way to disengage from combat safely and start doing something else.  Our core philosophy is that we want this game to be accessible to players of all skill levels, and be something that people who have been playing games for years and are fluent in the "language" of how games works can play together cooperatively with friends who aren't as familiar with gaming.  Part of our implementation of this philosophy is to make the core combo- the central element of combat- the most valuable thing you can do.  "Just mashing the attack button" should produce useful and effective results.  For players who like the game and want to grow into it there's lots of supplemental moves you can use to start doing something other than attack, like attack and then throw an enemy behind you into other enemies, or divekick to begin attacking, or use the air attack to change your Z-axis position.  The supplemental attacks are all individually useful, like if you happen to do one on accident it's neat and you can just use that one new tool plus the core combo, and build out from there.  Core combo cancel dash attacks and the new backdash on quarter-circle motions are for advanced players to play with, like there's never a vital need to stop attacking and scoot backwards to complete the game or be effective, but if you know how to do it and you can anticipate an incoming attack you can cancel your aggression and disengage and feel really cool about it.  We avoid things like levels or stat growth to prevent people who played the game a long time from completely overshadowing newer players, so our method of accommodating varying skill levels is to build a robust moveset of optional supplementary moves.

I really liked the idea of the backdash that kind of emerged from our conversation since it solves a few problems very neatly.  One is we didn't really have a way to move backwards while still facing forwards- we have a lot of moves that move you forward, an option to move sideways and even an option to turn you around in combat, but none moved you back to make more space.  Another problem is one anyone who has played an old arcade brawler might be familiar with: you're wailing on a boss and they're getting hit but you know they're going to do that invincible reversal attack to knock you down, you know in your bones  it's coming but you're mashing the attack button and you're kinda stuck in that animation.  Backdash is an option where if you know they're going to counterattack you can just QCB and backdash through the damage unphased and resume your pressure.  Since there's a way to do this forward through bullets with dash attack there ought to be a way to do it backwards through melee attacks- backdash is intended to have invincibility during the early frames, so I thought drawing these animations as taunts would be a cute way to sell what they do and give each character another angle of selling their personalities.

Monday's backdash animation is a bit of an exception.  Rather than taunting his opponent he tucks his guns in and makes his body as low-profile as possible.  This is actually something I'd been doing with all of his other movement animations, and now that I have the complete movement option set drawn they all fit together to convey his personality in a cohesive way:

This is his dash attack, side strafes and backdash poses.  Instead of flailing his limbs around or risking additional injury he repositions by making himself compact and being sure his weapons are pointed at the ground, no one else on the team does this.  Since Monday's flat personality is only realized in contrast to everyone else I try to find ways to sell his quiet professional whatevers in a consistent way.  So compared to his teammates...

He looks like he knows what he's doing.

The last thing I needed to draw this week are Emotes.  We have a whole bunch of longer animations in this game but we don't have too many that are nice and short.  "Cheer" is the first emote I've drawn and the idea for it came from our current throw implementation.  We have a multi-purpose Action button which is context-sensitive, like Action next to a ball will kick it, or Action next to a vending machine will bring up a vending menu, but Action on its own at any time will attempt to grab someone and throw them, as that's the top-level event for the Action stack.  Throw has a check event after startup to see if you successfully grab something throwable, and if you don't then it plays a short "whiff" animation.  In practice, what this means is that at any time in game you can press grab at any time and do a funny little pose, like so:

It's kind of silly, but it made me think, what if we had something like this on purpose?  A short little three-frame  pose to convey some kind of expression that we could apply to many different situations?  This is where "Cheer" comes from.

The current plan is Cheer can play at the start of a level, after a jump-in entry animation and a pre-level chatbox dialogue.  It can also play when a player picks up a power-up, with a condition that it plays when moving from no-powerups to powered-up, so if you pick up multiple powerups at once it's not stopping to play every single time.  Also, since Action+Attack is our button combo for doing specials, Action+Weaponswitch is a kind of empty input on our control setup, so we could set it up so pressing and holding that would play the Cheer emote and hold the last frame, so like players could make a fun gesture before or after doing something cool, or just stand by their friend posing uselessly while they do all the work.  It's really inexpensive and a way to give characters more personality.  Implementing power-ups is on our near-future to-do list, though, so this is the biggest reason I wanted to knock these out this week.  I'm happy I was able to just get all four characters' backdash and cheer emotes drawn this week, I pushed myself a bit but I got it all drawn up by today.  It's all done and in the bag, and there's really, honestly, seriously genuinely no other character animations left that I really absolutely have to do for our public promo demo.  There -is- another set of animations planned, but that's either for after the demo or if I finish up all of my other kanboard tasks first.  But for now, assets are animated for everything so everything can be implemented as soon as possible.

This week I absolutely am actually going to finish working on the next comic page.  Sorry again to my comic patron friends for the delays, but I really wanted to get this work done so it's prepared and ready to go for a big work push.  Next week will be all comic talk!  Thanks, as always, and I'll be back next Friday with more work to share!