I am back! The update coming on May 19th brings co-op play to FranknJohn. But that is not all! Oh no. We have also been super busy making the core combat more exciting and engaging based on your valuable feedback. Turn on the kettle and pull up a chair. This is a long one. The most common criticism on the base attack has been that it lacks variety. You are doing this single action for the whole game, which gets repetitive and doesn't offer much in the way of variety or experimentation. Bottom line, it just wasn't very exciting and couldn't carry the whole game. A big part of the problem lay with the way the base attack had been built. It was implemented using physics with a spring joint to control how the head behaved. The head was shot out using force and recoiled using the spring. This lead to many issues when trying to modify the attack for a Skullcap and ended up restricting their design. Due to the unpredictable nature of the physics, we could never gain exact control over it, hence some of the weird behaviours you may have noticed. Attacking was also quite ‘loose’. We tried to enhance the functionality of the attack by giving players some agency over the direction of the head once it had left the body. This sounds cool in theory, but in practice, analogue sticks just aren't cut out for that kind of use (nor are our fingers!) It came at the expense of accuracy and feeling, leading to a kind of toxic frustration that erodes away at you the more you play. A more focused base attack was needed. So we went back to the drawing board and dissected the entire system. We had one simple goal - how could we make the core gameplay more exciting? What we came up with was a system that is more flexible, providing more attacking options through additional base attacks and opening the door for Skullcaps to offer real variety. The first thing we did, was scrap the physics. Instead of forces and springs, we moved to simple lerping and as a result gained complete control over the head. Attack speed, range, recoil and a tonne of other small values that add to the feel of the attack, are now extremely accurate. The base attack is more satisfying than ever! It’s a punchy, straight in and out jab without any of the loose feeling or uncertainty. Happy days!
Moving onto Skullcaps! They have been sort of loosely defined as ‘power-ups’, with a blue-sky approach to their design. Some had cooldown abilities, some had added damage, some had weird effects on gameplay and some didn't do much at all. Not only was it hard to communicate what each new Skullcap did, they didn't really augment gameplay in a satisfying way. So we set about sorting Skullcaps into categories and used a distributed point system to balance them and open up different styles of play. The Skivvy

• Skullcaps now control Damage, Attack Speed and Attack Range
• Skullcaps have a damage type
• Skullcaps modify the base attack and augment the additional swipe and slam attacks
• Every Skullcap has a special ability with a cooldown.

Prefer to stay at distance? Pick up a Skullcap that has huge range and speed, but low damage. Want to get a little more intimate with the nasties? Try out a Skullcap with low range and speed but insane damage. Not only that, but the form of the base attack can also change. You can get a nice idea of some of them from the screenie below (you may have to zoom in to read!)
We didn't stop there - we've been prototyping two new base attacks; a cleave and a ground slam (as you've seen above) The idea is that these additional attacks, like the base attack, will each serve a specific function. The cleave hits enemies in an arc and knocks them back, but does less damage. The ground slam does an overhead (overtorso?) slam, doing hefty AOE damage, but at the cost of a longer charge up time. Before, the best strategy was to aggro enemies and hit them on the run. With these new attacks, we are trying to encourage you to get stuck in, equipped with the tools to deal with a variety of situations. These attacks aren't ready for the coming update, but we’ll share more info about them very soon. Last but not least, we added an attack animation to the body, tilted the head depending on shoot direction and added tastier particle effects when face-smashing things. There is more crunchy-ness in the sound effects too. We also added subtle feedback to enemies when taking damage, such as a tiny pause when hit and a bit of knockback. All of these little things really help with the feel of the combat. Hope you found this interesting and we can't wait for you to try out the new changes! Paul and team

[ 2015-05-13 17:46:20 CET ] [ Original post ]