Boss Player - Primary Control Scheme (or how I learned to stop worrying and love the radial menu)
In Guardian Soul, one of the players will control the bosses that will fight the player controlling the actual hero character.
In order to make it easy for people to play the game offline, as well as to make the control of boss attacks and patterns more flexible, I decided that bosses could be controlled entirely with the mouse, if the player so chose.
Only the left mouse button will be used, as I'm making this is Flash.
It all starts with a crosshair:
Bugger looks a bit lonely. Lets place him on the play field. Lets position him on our attack's start position:
Lets click, and be greeted by our friend, the radial menu:
Now just look at those possibilities! So many creative ways to dish out some punishment upon your unsuspecting opponent. Each option of the menu is a different 'attack', essentially a different action your boss character can perform.
Lets see what the one on the left is:
A machinegun attack. After the first click, the main crosshair is locked in place, and a secondary cursor is used to select which move you want, highlighting it and giving out its name.
Lets try it out. We click again on the Machinegun attack to select it:
Now we're given an arrow pointing at where we want to fire the attack from the starting position. This will be the way to control many attacks, but the idea is that there will be several attack and patterns with their own unique ways to be controlled. I'll design the whole thing to make learning these different controls as intuitive as possible, but there will be a comprehensive tutorial as a last resort.
Lets point the attack at the hero player, clicking for the third time and ending our input: (the crosshair will now be free to move again and issue another command while the first one is ongoing, allowing the boss player to queue attacks. There will also be a way to cancel the attack in the middle, within reason)
A simple attack, but the first of many possibilities. There will also be a way to make the boss simply move to a new position, if it can do that (some bosses may be more stationary and other very agile).
Well, I'm open for feedback and suggestions. I'm not sure something like this has been done in the past, but if it has I'd love to see a working solution to compare this to.
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