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[xix]

Haha, pixel now I know why you're cool.

1) I do both Martial Arts and play TONS of Dark Souls Smiley  The idea when you have a slow, heavy weapon, is to either only attack when you know you'll hit both, or to keep moving, and strike at one opponent when the other is positioned awkwardly (behind him, etc) and can't reach you.

A skilled player in Dark Souls shouldn't really balk at a 2v1. But then - you've got the dodge roll there; I don't think Moon Fields has that mechanic? I know it has the dash - but does that offer I-frames like the Souls dodge roll? So that could be a big difference.

There is no roll in my game. There's a dash boot that helps you move to maximum dash speed in any direction immediately. Otherwise you tap the run button a lot to move quickly. There are no i-frames, though, I have a 'secret' mechanic that nobody really seems to know/care about where if you are moving at maximum dash you don't get stunned but you do lose your dashing. I call it "Barreling". It kinda works like having a dash with armor. You have to hit the run button 3x to get up to barreling speed, and you have to hit it 4x/s afterwards to maintain barreling speed. By the time I get to barreling it's about 3-4 tiles of space which is kind of a lot of space, so it might be a useful tactic in 2v1 if you're willing to get damaged first.

2) I'd agree about letting heavy/long winded attacks be canceled. I'd suggest a dedicated button for this - probably the jump/dash button.

I was thinking of syncing whether or not you can cancel out of an attack w/ what kind of attack they are. There are 3 tiers:

1) Normal - these are generally fast, on block the attacker gets stunned - I call this Return Stun (please help me if my faux borrowed fighting game terminology is confusing/wrong). This stun is the stun they would have given to the other player if they had connected, but it is modified by the weapon's internal return stun multiplier and the shield's return stun multiplier. E.g. an attacker using a Spear (return stun = 1.125) hits a weak Barricade shield (return stun 0.75) on an attack that would have done 20f of stun ends up getting ~19f of stun. If the same attacker used the same attack on the Tomb Shield (return stun 1) they'd get 25f stun. The larger blocking shields do 1.5 return stun with the buckler hitting 2 return stun. Blocking the spear w/ buckler gets almost 50f stun.

You can get hit and stunned out of these attacks - so I'm thinking you can "hit yourself out" and cancel out of these AFTER you've already scored a hit.

2) Power attacks - these are usually attacks you do before moving into other attacks. Attackers do not get Return Stun during these attacks because they "power through". The neutral straight sword attack is a Backhand/Forehand swipe combo with the first swipe being a Power attack. Canceling out of this seems to make sense to me.

3) Armored attacks - these are the heaviest attacks. They are essentially power attacks that you can't even get stunned out of. I'm not sure I want the player to be able to cancel out of these. This is like the giant Mountain hammer or the huge Iron Lance stab. I worry that making it so that you can't cancel out of SOME attacks might be confusing for people, but i dunno...

I'm thinking the jump/dash button is best for this. I think that hitting someone and trying  to run away is going to get people to do this accidentally, and eventually they might notice that they're doing this a lot faster with the more nimble weapons. Hopefully. I am also thinking that jump/dash to cancel out of normal or power, and anything to cancel out of just normal. I could also make it so that dashing lets you cancel out of the second attack in a 2hit power attack string.

So many options. Gonna think about this all day.

[xix]

I have settled on the DASH/JUMP CANCEL. It is the high level technique that I had wished to avoid, but I think it's very helpful and it's easy to stumble upon. When you attack, hit, and want to get away - you press the DASH/JUMP button to cancel the rest of the attack and go right into dashing or jumping. This only works on the NORMAL and POWER attacks. I'm *thinking* of letting you JUMP cancel out of armored attacks, but... I am thinking that's a little too granular and I can't think of when I'd want to allow that.

Tbh, this was really simple and easy. It's kind of beautiful, and I think I fretted about this too much. Ha.

I am currently thinking about the particulars. E.g. should you be able to cancel a power attack that hit a shield? Which normal attacks should have longer recoveries? Should I let armored attacks that hit be jump cancelable? Does the Normal -> Power -> Armored heirarchy make sense to anyone but me? Aye..



**Image unrelated to post**

[xix]

Here's the first runthrough of the new item the Fire Book. I'll going to go in through the design process of items/attacks/skills.

The Fire Book is meant to fill in a few holes in the armory: 1) magic items 2) fire skills 3) space control 4) projectiles. The Fire Book has two skills: throwable fireballs and ranged firebolts.

The first thing I designed was the throwable fireball. As a throwable object (even though it's magic), I needed it to act differently than other throwables. The throwable bomb does random amounts of damage (based on where the child explosions spawn). Since it usually does 3-4 damage with a random high of max 6 damage, it's a really good way to threaten enemies who come at you. Since magic attacks are repeatable, I wanted to encourage lots of fireballs. Each fireball will usually do 1 damage on a hit, but fireballs leave a spawnpoint for flames. For about 3 seconds you can punish players for going through your fire wake. As a person up against fireballs, it's a trade whether you want to go through the fire and risk a damage or two to get positioning.

Doing some amazing quarterbacking with a throwable bomb nets you huge damage or even a kill, but it's a lot less satisfying to throw a weaker fireball long range. I decided to leave the Fireball on jump and neutral, and put a Fire Bolt on tilt. I duplicated the crossbow bolt. I wanted it to do a lot of damage, but having it be similar to the regular crossbow would be a boring design. The regular Crossbow's 2 damage attack stuns long enough to link into itself to do a full kill. I made it so that the Fire Bolt was 1 damage and didn't have much stun at all. I was initially thinking it would spawn 1 damage flame objects, but the coolest part I noticed from that was doing a large amount of damage, so I just made it explode for 2 damage after a period of time. Cool strategies:

1) If you miss the bolt still explodes so most players will avoid errant Firebolts.
2) Alternating Shortbow Arrows with Firebolts makes for interesting blocking battles. If you notice the defender is blocking you can switch to Firebolts to still get some damage. The defender then has to respond with some kind of horizontal movement or a jump.
3) If the Firebolt is stuck in a player (or shield), they have a couple seconds to chase you down so the explosion hits both of you

[Pixel Noise]

I think the normal/power/armored tiers of attacks make sense - though when and how you'll be able to cancel which attacks is really important, of course. This may just need testing, but I'd suggest only allowing the cancel BEFORE the attack lands - after an attack, there should be an appropriate amount of "cool down" time (less for normal attacks, more for armored), where the player is immobile while carrying through the attack.

For example, in Dark Souls, if you are swinging a massive greatsword around 2handed, you can't be stunned out of your attack - but you also can't cancel out of the follow-through; Once you commit to the swing, you're committed. That's important.

SO if the armored attacks have a big wind-up or a big "cool down", I'd definitely allow cancelling out of them, BEFORE the attack lands/initiates. The more "telegraphing" and wind-up an attack has, the more it deserves to be able to be cancelled, so the player can feint. But I don't know that I'd allow attacks to be cancelled after striking a shield, etc - then I'd allow the stun mechanic you've described to take effect.

[xix]

For example, in Dark Souls, if you are swinging a massive greatsword around 2handed, you can't be stunned out of your attack - but you also can't cancel out of the follow-through; Once you commit to the swing, you're committed. That's important.

Ah yeah, that's one of the weird things that's different between Dark Souls and Street Fighter. In Street Fighter, there's a lot of strategy involved with when and how you flow from attack to attack to movement. I'm pretty happy with how if you score a normal or power hit you're allowed to get out of there super fast, but if you've missed you're stuck in whiffland waiting for your punishment. Power attacks let you hit a shield and bolt, too, which is kind of a neat benefit of those slower attacks vs. Normals. I'm still unsure if I'm going to let you jump out of armored attacks. The idea that you can jump out of armored attacks still commits you to a location, but it lets you dodge enemies' lazier horizontal swipe attacks. I'm leaning towards no, but I'm gonna keep this idea in my backpocket.

I'm adding more items to the game before my next event (3 weeks! Indie Arcade in Madison, WI). I have 3 more magic items - the Fire Book from above, a Displacement Tome for more Ninja-y-er movement, and a Fire Sword that can use magic to do Fire Damage. I have a gigantic sword called The Whale and a Bident/Trident spear I want for variation on midrange attacks. I'm also thinking about breaking one of my design goals of having The Mountain be a huge fuckoff weapon with just one OHKO attack. Too many people want to use it as their main weapon, and it's really not possible to use it as your main weapon. Even the Iron Lance is more viable.

I guess I'll just use this as an opportunity to throw out as many ideas as I have for items:

Drop goo bomb, maybe it finishes by lighting itself on fire
A snake/whip thing that can shoot black goo
An item for taunting
A spell that shoots an object out, and if a player collides w/ that object, that players switches positions w/ the caster
Shouting spells, movement manipulation spells - maybe these could be items
I have a kind of holy armor spell that looks great, but I have no idea what to do with it
More lightning attacks would be good to flesh out the holy magic

Ok, I'm exhausted and I don't know why I even started this post, but I've been working all night and I wanted to wind down so... yup yup yup

[xix]

Finally building new stages. This one is turning out to be my favorite stage. For most stages I think about different fighting areas and how they flow into each other. In the forest stage there are large grass patches that can occlude sight so you are fighting wild. That area surrounds a center area that is empty where the more civilized fights take place. In the dungeon stage there are three vertical lanes where the fights take place, and inbetween there are areas filled with statues that make for cover vs. projectiles and unwieldy weapons.

This one has multiple areas of fighting separated vertically. The optimal paths for speed are more predictable, and holding chokepoints is much more dynamic here. There are ways around an enemy guarding a particular cliffside, but you have to solve another dex problem in walking tightropes. If you fall you don't lose automatically, but you are in a significantly worse position than you started. Because of all of these things, the melee is slower paced and more about footsies and fundamentals than positioning and rotating for the right angle. And since the stage is so open, range has a lot more opportunities to surprise other people. Preettty neat if you ask me.

I have some ideas for the water that I haven't fully decided yet, but I *think* I'm sure. I want water to squelch fire and also spread electricity. I also need to get more FX in. I have a ripple effect when things enter the water, but I want more FX.

[xix]

Did a 2v2 test with some folks. I'm the only "pro" level player, so it's not as high level, but you'll see some interesting strategies evolve. There's a point in a Ravine battle where I shielded along a gap on the top to slow down our opponents, and my partner just rained down explosives. We also attempt to do other things like separate teams by throwing goo or dropping caltrops. Many times the strategies collapse on themselves, and I find that to be interesting, too, but... we'll see come the next time.

[The Armorman]

I, (that's right: your pal The Armorman!) The Armorman have played this vid-con and can attest to how good it is continually. Good for the family. Good for some friends, good for two lovers that are starcrossed with bitter upset families.

[xix]

Thanks Armorman. Those are some good words.

In today's gamedev news, I'm playing around w/ a design change for the blocking mechanics. Currently it is:

Shield colliders are always active. If you hit someone's shield collider and are doing a normal attack, you receive stun = (attack stun * weapon stun retain * shield stun return). The defender's choice on pressing the shield button or not changes the position of the collider, but not the value of the stun the attacker would receive.

What I'm hoping to change it to is:

Shield colliders are always active. If you hit someone's shield collider and are doing a normal attack, you receive stun = (attack stun * weapon stun retain), the same as if you hit the environment. The defender can press the shield button right before the attack to counter a power attack***. The defender can then release the shield button to return a large stun = (attack stun * weapon stun retain * shield stun return). The defender's choice on pressing the shield button lets you POWER BLOCK and releasing the button lets you PARRY.

I'm pretty gungho for this system right now, but the one thing I'm unsure about is how much time to stun the attacker who gets POWER BLOCKED. Please inform, thanks.

[xix]

Whoa, spent tonight working on ^^^

The Power Block and Parry separation did not feel good. I like the idea of aiming, holding block, and letting go of block to get a huge amount of stun on your enemy, but the last part of letting go just does not jive w/ the free movement. What has happening was that if you block you save a reference of the enemy you blocked, and no matter where they were they got pinged for the stun, and that killed the feeling of physicality the rest of the game has.

So I just made it one action. I think Parry is a good word for it. Each Shield has a Parry Multiplier which can range anywhere between 1 (no parry) up to 3 (full parry). For the first 8 frames a shield is out, the stun return is multiplied by the Parry Multiplier. E.g. if you score a parry with the Buckler your stun lasts 3x as long.

[Pixel Noise]

The the Parry/stun mechanic, is it all or nothing for the success/stun duration, or will there be varying levels of Parry success/Stun? Like if the Parry is perfectly times, full effect, but if it hits early or late, partial effect?

[xix]

Right now you hit block and have your parry multiplier for 1/8 of a second (7 frames). After the parry window blocking returns stun like normal (attack stun times a weapons stun return).

I don't know the benefits of a more in depth system with tiers of parry, but it's not too hard to implement it this way.

[Pixel Noise]

No I think that works, was just curious. I don't think you need to have different success tiers for parry. It's something they added in Dark Souls 3 - a "partial parry", which is what made me think to ask.

[xix]

I know that there are smarter ways to do this, but Screen To GIF really helps me out. I use OBS to capture video, and here I just used StG to get me straight to these GIFs. Sometimes I use VLC to crop the videos which is pretty imprecise, but then I use GIMP to make GIFs. GIMP uses a plugin that's linked in this lifehacker article. That process is really, really slow, though if your computer can't handle StG you can get really good quality GIFs that way.

As a cheat I use imgur to convert youtube vids to GIF. The quality goes way down, but sometimes lo-fi is nice (I'm @LUNARSIGNALS on instagram, fyi).

On that note:





Sorry for the huge GIFs. These are GIFs/images I'm putting together for my itch.io page. I know I want to show off

1) How indepth the character select screen can be --- and hopefully how easy it is to navigate
2) The cool animations (2nd image)
3) How crazy battles can get over the whole screen (4th screen?)
4) The different stages

I'm sorta kinda worried about the image size (the GIFs are as big as the game), but I'm sorta kinda not worried about it. I can't think of many folks scouring itch.io on a mobile connection.

[xix]

Click through for the high resolution image.

[xix]

TFW you're making a multiplayer game and there's a 2hr long tournament and the whole crowd is flipping out all the time.

[xix]

**Warning** This video is lo res to get max frames for recording fidelity**

I got some really good matches in with some FGC duder from the Madison area. I made some notations linked in the "Show More" section. There are a handful of techniques that I know I need to explain to folks, but I'm looking for assistance here:

I made some notations about the cool moments in the "Show More" section. Every notation is something crazy happening. I know i want players who play the game to be able to 1) understand what's going on 2) maybe have a hope of doing the things. E.g. axe surprise is Brave Cat anticipating my forward sword so he jumps over it and axes down into Colt's face. Shields at 1:28 is how using a side shield can protect you and give you time against one of the deadlier attacks in the game. And statues at 6:56 is about how you can use the environment as a supplemental shield. i just don't know how to tutorialize alll of these little nuanced things.

[xix]

*also*

I put up the early access version of the game up on itch.io. There's a demo here. Please try it out if you got some controllers and friends and love for me. Thanks ya'll.

[xix]

I forgot to mention that there's a demo out on my itch.io page. Please check it out if you can!

[Pixel Noise]

Dang I really want to try it out, but don't have anyone around to play locally with at the moment.