Lately, we had a lot of
feedbacks about
21 bytes, and more precisely about the combat system of
21 Bytes.
Those
feedbacks were very interesting, they helped us a lot. They allowed us to focus on some of the aspects of
21 Bytes.
But with those feedbacks, some of you asked us the same thing :
Why wouldn’t you put a lock system in 21 Bytes ? Eh, that’s a good question, why not ?
After all, we don’t hide our inspiration of the
Zelda series. So, why not ?
We already thought about using a
Lock system for 21 bytes, but each time, we decided not to use it.
The combat system in 21 Bytes is based on the
player placement. 21 Bytes is not really like a beat them all. You don’t have a lots of combos.
We don’t want the player to know how to memorize and use a large number of attacks, we want him to learn to
develop reflexes and
understand and
avoid the
enemies behaviors.
The monster’s behaviors were made with this philosophy in mind. If we add a lock system in 21 Bytes, we would just
break the balance of the game.
Adding a lock system would make the game too easy or too hard in some other case.
But why making this choice in the first place?We did it for
several reasons.

At our level, it’s much more affordable for us to make a combat system based on
placement and
dodging.
In addition, this combat system allows the player to face
multiple enemies at once. This will happen often because the enemies have a
group behavior. It’s hard to fight 5 or 10 enemy with a lock system when they all attack you at the
same time.
And finally, the last reason:
It’s linked to the
ephemerality of the avatar. The avatar has a
time limit, he is constantly under constraint,
constantly pressed by time.
Adding a lock system would create a conflict between this
sense of urgency and the
slowness of a “locked” fight. A fight in which the two opponents
turn around each others.And that’s for all these reasons that we decided not to have any lock system in
21 Bytes.