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[JohnnyLonack]

Finally got the chance to make some friends play Griefhelm. I didn't expect it yet, but they had good genuine fun! But besides the laughing and mocking of the opponent, the game wasn't creating an appropriate atmosphere for the duel. Had to intervene immediately!

The first thing I added was some cloth simulation. No knight can look fancy with a rigid surcoat, and I'm really happy with the obtained results.

Ok! The death animations worked... But only if the opponent died on a flat surface. In other cases, in which death occurred while jumping or standing near a ledge, the effect was simply awful. Therefore, I went in and added some blending with a Ragdoll during death. I think it looks pretty cool!

Finally, the most important thing that was limiting the atmosphere was, of course, the complete absence of audio. I now added Music and sword swing, hit, and parry sounds.
Check the videos out here:
http://www.indiedb.com/games/griefhelm/videos/sword-swing-and-hit-audio-music
http://www.indiedb.com/games/griefhelm/videos/parry-swing-and-hit-audio

Cheers,
JDL

[jg.camarasa]

Looking a-we-so-me, following instantly! Love the ragdoll physics and the cloth simulation, those were really good choices!

[JohnnyLonack]

Looking a-we-so-me, following instantly! Love the ragdoll physics and the cloth simulation, those were really good choices!

Awesome to hear that!!! Thank you so much! I'll soon release a prototype in which you can play in 4 players as well! Let me know what you think of the combat system in the meanwhile

[Thaumaturge]

This looks rather impressive thus far, I find! ^_^

Forgive me if I've simply missed this, but do you have AI opponents, or is it strictly player vs. player?

I'm doing something broadly similar in my combat mechanic, I think--albeit that I'm working on a flat horizontal plane, rather than side-on platforms. I even ended up doing something similar with the controls: directional control (mouse-based in my case) performs a block, and an action-button enacts an attack from that direction.

[JohnnyLonack]

This looks rather impressive thus far, I find! ^_^

Forgive me if I've simply missed this, but do you have AI opponents, or is it strictly player vs. player?

I'm doing something broadly similar in my combat mechanic, I think--albeit that I'm working on a flat horizontal plane, rather than side-on platforms. I even ended up doing something similar with the controls: directional control (mouse-based in my case) performs a block, and an action-button enacts an attack from that direction.

Thank you! , I still haven't implemented AI unfortunately. Where can i see the game you are talking about? does it work kind of like Exanima?

[JohnnyLonack]

Added Foliage and modeled placeholder volumes. Let me know what you guys think

[Thaumaturge]

The grasses look decent, I think. They appear somewhat sparse, to my eye--clumps of grass on a surface of some other sort (sand, perhaps). If that's the intended effect, then excellent! ^_^

(If you're going for denser grass, perhaps have the surface colour be closer to that of the grass.)

Thank you! , I still haven't implemented AI unfortunately. Where can i see the game you are talking about? does it work kind of like Exanima?

It's been a while since I looked ad Exanima, but I seem to recall that they were going for physics-based combat. If that's still the case, then no, not really. (I did spend some time on a physics-based prototype at one stage, but ended up discarding it.) Perhaps in a very general sense--but my impression of Examina's combat is very vague, so I'm not sure of how it works beyond the use of physics and the third-person camera-view.

If you've played the old Quest for Glory games (in particular the first three), then you have a good start to how my game's combat works; it might perhaps be described as "Quest for Glory by way of Dark Souls".

If not, then in short, it's something like this: When the player encounters an enemy in a level, they're dropped into a "combat world". Here they face their opponent, one-on-one; the combatants automatically face each other, so that side-stepping becomes circling. The player can attack from the left, right, or top, and block in those directions too. They can also dodge to the left, right, or backwards. All of these actions, aside from blocking, drain stamina--although stamina regenerates quickly. The abilities of enemies vary widely--they may have an unblockable attack, or a special movement ability, etc.--but for the most part they play by the same rules. (For the sake of clarity, I'll note that combat is real-time, not turn-based.)

As to where you can see my game, the image in my signature below should link to my dev-log on this site, and has links to my twitter account and website.

[JohnnyLonack]

The grasses look decent, I think. They appear somewhat sparse, to my eye--clumps of grass on a surface of some other sort (sand, perhaps). If that's the intended effect, then excellent! ^_^

(If you're going for denser grass, perhaps have the surface colour be closer to that of the grass.)

Thank you! , I still haven't implemented AI unfortunately. Where can i see the game you are talking about? does it work kind of like Exanima?

It's been a while since I looked ad Exanima, but I seem to recall that they were going for physics-based combat. If that's still the case, then no, not really. (I did spend some time on a physics-based prototype at one stage, but ended up discarding it.) Perhaps in a very general sense--but my impression of Examina's combat is very vague, so I'm not sure of how it works beyond the use of physics and the third-person camera-view.

If you've played the old Quest for Glory games (in particular the first three), then you have a good start to how my game's combat works; it might perhaps be described as "Quest for Glory by way of Dark Souls".

If not, then in short, it's something like this: When the player encounters an enemy in a level, they're dropped into a "combat world". Here they face their opponent, one-on-one; the combatants automatically face each other, so that side-stepping becomes circling. The player can attack from the left, right, or top, and block in those directions too. They can also dodge to the left, right, or backwards. All of these actions, aside from blocking, drain stamina--although stamina regenerates quickly. The abilities of enemies vary widely--they may have an unblockable attack, or a special movement ability, etc.--but for the most part they play by the same rules. (For the sake of clarity, I'll note that combat is real-time, not turn-based.)

As to where you can see my game, the image in my signature below should link to my dev-log on this site, and has links to my twitter account and website.

Thanks for the feedback! I went and fixed it by making the ground with a grass texture, (I used texture bombing to hide repetitions and then applied a world noise above to create variance in the colors on both the foliage and the surface underneath it).
I saw your project! Seems very demanding, how big of an adventure are you creating?

[Thaumaturge]

Thanks for the feedback! ...

It's my pleasure--I'm glad if I've helped! ^_^

Aside from texture-bombing (which is new to me, and a neat-looking algorithm), I did something similar with my own grass: an underlying surface with a similar texture, and a large "variation" texture used to alter the colours of both.

I saw your project! Seems very demanding, how big of an adventure are you creating?

It is somewhat of a big project, indeed! I currently intend about eight levels (including the prologue level), albeit of wildly varying sizes. (Combat is pretty sparse in my game: only a few enemies per level, on average, as I currently intend to have it.)

[JohnnyLonack]

Released prototype 0.0.0.4 which features a menu (finally :D) and up to 4 players!

Download prototype!

Release Notes:

4 Players
Added the possibility to play from 2 to 4 players. I had to fix some things in order to achieve this, for example, a player could hit only one player at a time with a swords slash and it didn't feel right at all
I never tried the chaos of going free for all in 4... But I wanted to have this feature and hope it is good fun! Would probably be better with teams, but they aren't there just yet!

Main Menu
I finally added a Main Menu. It is very simple as of now. It contains Play, Tutorial and Quit. The tutorial button still doesn't work and the play button brings you directly to the Character Selection menu. In the future there will be a Play menu with different options for the map, gamemode, single or multiplayer, tournament, etc.

Player Selection and Customization
In the Character Selection menu, you can change your appearance in terms of helm and armor. There are 3 helms and 3 armors to choose from as for now. The chosen appearance will be saved so tht you don't have to change it everytime! . In the future I will make a bunch of different armors and helms as well as unlockables!

Foliage
I added grass to the ground to make the whole thing come more to life. I had to do some performance tweaks since UE4 is very demanding when it comes to foliage. I did some perspective tricks by upscaling closer foliage. I'm happy with the results and managed to cover all of the surface with 20000 tris.

[JohnnyLonack]

[JohnnyLonack]

Download Here!

Hey everyone!
It's been a while since my last update, but I finally made it to a point where the game is no longer a prototype but a fully functional game, which is just lacking in content right now!
In this release, I added 3 gamemodes, a new armor set, level selection (with only one level ), athletics, melee attacks, and an infinite amount of fixes and tweaks.

Gamemodes
Tug-of-war: This is the core gamemode of Griefhelm. It works just like in Nidhogg, who gets the kill gets the lead and needs to run towards the goal. But that's not all, unlike Nidhogg, Griefhelm supports up to 4 players for this mode. The struggles to make this work were incredibly painful, especially handling the camera behavior and player respawn. Nevertheless, I am really happy with the results and need to hunt down any bugs you guys find
Free for all: Ignorance at its best, you are all thrown into the same screen starting a bloodbath and backstabbing your friends in their effort of blocking and strinking other opponents. Oh, a cool way of playing this is actually having one player fight another one while the others watch and whoever wins gets to fight next one. Once the match ends, the player who survived gets to start against the first one that died the match before.
Team* skirmish: Two teams fight each other, and there is friendly fire so don't expect to thrust through your teammate to kill the opponent. However, I'll leave friendly fire as an option in the future.
* For all the team-based gamemodes players will have colored plumes on their helms to identify their team.

Full Plated Armor
There are now 4 armor sets. This was important since the game supports 4 players, therefore, having a minimum of 4 armor sets was a must!

Athletics and Melee
To avoid making the combat system useless I had to reduce the speed and jump height of the players. This is because if players were too fast and jumped too much then blocking was pointless since dodging was so much easier. So the game has more of a classic Prince of Persia approach to sidescrolling: with semi-realistic speeds and jump heights. While this fixed the combat problem, it brought up a new one: platforming. In order to achieve a bit of vertical variation in the game's movement I had to add ledge climbing and ladders, and of course design levels according to how these design elements interact with each other.

Another thing I noticed was that players were constantly getting too close. Close to a point where their sword swings wouldn't hit. To fix this, I added the fact that when two players are up close whoever attacks first performs a kick to "reset the distances" and obviously giving a slight stun to the opponent.

Level: Woods
All of the footage you see in the game is taken from the level Woods, which is the first complete level in the game. My goal is to have other 3 levels for version 0.5.

You actually read everything? That's awesome! Thank you so much! Make sure you download the game, try it out, and don't hesitate in giving me feedback. You could be of great influence to the outcome of this game!

'Till next time,
Johnny Dale Lonack

[TonyManfredonia]

Man, this is awesome. The animations are superb! I’ll have to give the demo a go. Great work!

What inspired this? How would you like to see it as an end product? I love your approach!!!

[JohnnyLonack]

Man, this is awesome. The animations are superb! I’ll have to give the demo a go. Great work!

What inspired this? How would you like to see it as an end product? I love your approach!!!

Thank you so much man! Inspirations are Nidhogg and Mount and blade mainly. A bit of classic Prince of Persia as well!
I see the End Product having different weapons, AI (which is still missing), Tournament mode, and Unlocks (which will be like in Super smash brothers, depending on some parameters, foes will appear that either have a new helm, armor, or weapon; if you defeat them, you unlock whatever they have). There could also be new game modes! I'm not sure about online play... I'm designing so that I can integrate it in the future... But I'm afraid of not being able to handle all the latency issues in the best way... It's certainly something I'd think about post-release.

[JohnnyLonack]

Just updated the demo on IndieDB! Added godrays and new athletics.

Download Here!

[JohnnyLonack]

You can now challenge a work-in-progress AI, hop in and tell me what you think!

My approach to AI is to start by making the perfect machine, the perfect combatant... well at least to the extent I'm capable of. So the first thing I did was making the AI's reflexes instantaneous so that there is no way to get through its blocks, as you see in the video below...

...Read More

[JohnnyLonack]

Working on adding new weapons to the game. The models used are placeholders so ignore the fact that they look horrible or lack in decent proportions

[JohnnyLonack]

Griefhelm 0.4.4 Is Here!

You can now use weapons such as the hammer, spear, one-handed sword, and the mace.

After working so long on the game's mechanics considering only one weapon, the Greatsword, I would have never thought that I could have other 4 new weapons in such a short time. But here we are! 4 new weapons to kick your opponent's a** with .

The hardest part was finding parameters to play with to give benefits and disadvantages to each weapon in order to have a ground on which to tweak values to obtain balancing.
This wouldn't have been as hard if the Tug-of-War gamemode wasn't one-hit-kill, but this is a crucial rule for the gamemode's effectiveness, hence Damage was not a parameter I could rely on.
So, for example, what advantage can an unbalanced, slow, heavy blunt weapon like the Warhammer have against a Greatsword? ... Well, it took me a while, and the idea I came up with was... A bad one I decided to make blunt weapons unblockable! Yay, that meant that each time you found yourself fighting an opponent with a blunt weapon, the whole blocking system became useless, and consequently the directional attack from the opponent's standpoint. Luckily, the idea wasn't 100% bad, it simply needed more thinking. Blunt weapons have a stronger impact, I needed to give relevance to this, and if it couldn't translate in delivering more damage, nor in being unblockable, then what could it do? ... The answer to this was that It can be blocked but it will still deliver its impact, this translates into the player not being able to counter-attack immediately. I stuck with this solution, and it seems to work fine and wepons like this can suit players that prefer focusing more on timing and footwork and relax a bit more in terms of reflexes. In the GIF below you can see how the hammer's impact stuns the player who just blocked the incoming attack.

So in the end, the parameters on which I can tweak balancing of weapons are:

- Range
- Speed
- Impact on parry
- Animation telegraphing

The last point refers to how many visual cues the animation gives before a strike happens, which makes it easier for someone to understand the direction of attack. The spear is the most effective weapon in this aspect, since all attacks are thrusts, so they are pretty similar.

Warhammer
The Warhammer is slightly shorter than the Greatsword, it is slower, but can't be counterattacked.

Spear
The Spear is substantially longer than the Greatsword, it is hard to use at close ranges, it is hard to predict.

One-Handed Sword
The One-Handed Sword is short and very fast, also kind of hard to predict.

Mace
Slightly longer than the One-Handed Sword, not as fast, but still fast, and can't be counterattacked.

Your feedback is crucial!
I could only test these a bit against AI. It is 100% sure that there are things to tweak, and that there will be an OP attack or something, so if you guys can share your experience and give me suggestions I would be very grateful!

I hope you enjoy the new release!

You can also follow the game here:
Website: https://johnnylonack.wixsite.com/griefhelm
Discord: https://discord.gg/eTk7Kav
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Griefhelm
Twitter: https://twitter.com/griefhelm
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/griefhelm/
IndieDB: https://www.indiedb.com/games/griefhelm
Itch.io https://johnnydale.itch.io/griefhelm