Combat Revamp, Part I (Plus Gameplay Footage!)

The changes to combat have begun!

I buffed up the little guys a lot -- they do about 1/3 of your health in damage now. Health did not feel like a useful stat:

- If you have no Speed, you feel a bit slow.
- If you have no Jump, your jump feels lacking.
- If you have no Swing, you feel like you swing slowly.
- If you have no Reach, you feel like you're using a plain sword and not a super-cool one.
- If you have no Luck, you "feel less lucky" -- less 'things' in general drop less often.

However, if you had no Health boost, you still felt pretty durable. I knocked Health's importance up to be equal to that of the other stats, and I think it's worth it -- now you don't overlook Health on your gear. Before it was "Oh, cool, this sword has Luck, Luck, Luck, Jump....and Health". Now Health has a purpose -- if you get hit a lot, Health will help you out now. Before the change, anything more than 1 line felt like overkill.

I did several things to make combat more interesting:

- The HP of the enemies has been buffed slightly.
- The damage enemies do to you has been buffed -- they actually feel "dangerous" now.
- Spawners can now wait for a period of time before they begin to spawn enemies.

The third point is the most crucial here, and it factually makes combat more interesting. The other two will require playtesting to see how they fare as features. What I can now do is set up spawners so they will start spawning mobs at interval x after time y. This enables me to generate "waves" of specific enemy types.

A screenshot of a spawner's parameters in the map editor:

If a SPAWN_PRETIME is not specified, it will assume it should begin spawning immediately. It's a decently elegant solution and I'm glad I made my initial code modular enough to support parameters like this. I have a feeling there will be many more parameters to come.

I also began moving the levels over to the new "art style". While it is still programmer art, I think this will be much closer to the style the game will be going with in the future:

Level '1':

Level '2':

Level '3' (you can also see a Trail effect here):

I lied a bit when I said "Gameplay Footage". This is a raw, unedited playthrough of the majority of the test levels. It was meant to be shown as purely demonstration footage to other game developers, particularly as an analysis of the current issues with combat. However I thought I would post it up so you can see it. The music is not in-game music -- it's just what I was listening to at the time. Again, this is raw demo footage meant for development purposes -- not a trailer.

Thanks for sticking around! I honestly appreciate every pageview I receive!