How are there this many animations?! (Patreon)

Version 1.11 is open to all patrons!

Still doing succubus animations.  The above screenshot is the WIP of her basic grapple animation.  This upcoming version of the grapple system will be triggered when the player is stunned by her range attack.  While the player is stunned she walk towards them, then enter into the base grapple, the stance shown above.  From there in the future the animations will branch and probably be randomized a bit, but for this first version there she'll go into a specific grapple which will then have multiple levels of depth to it.

Now the part of the grapple system that I'm still working on the design of is how the grapple levels and the grapple breaking works.  Currently to break out of a grapple it's just one left click of the mouse.  Then each higher level of grapple will need to be broken in succession.  For instance if the player is in a level 2 grapple they'll need to click once to break down to level 1 then once again to completely break out of the grapple.  Most likely the hotkey will change to something that's a bit more difficult to hit by accident, probably space bar.  I'm also trying to avoid doing a button mashing system for the grapple breaks because I think those types of systems are really difficult to balance correctly.  I'm sure most people have played those games where the button mashing is just way too fast and too much and then other games where it's so easy that it seems pointless to even have the system there.  There's also the possibility of doing a cursor timing game sort of like the active reloading mechanic from Gears of War or the job minigames from Fable.  The downside to this is that it might be sort of distracting for the player.  There's nothing worse than trying to focus on an animation but then being required to look at a UI gauge for the gameplay instead.  Any thoughts, feedback, ideas, or game examples that I should check out for similar grappling systems are very welcome.

Well, that's where my thinking is at currently.  I'm going to keep chipping away at the animations, writing dialogues, and polishing up systems for the near future.  The current goal is to have the next build out sometime in December.