This week was all about adding some finishing touches to Dawksin
Some of the not-so-exciting things were some general bugfixes:
- Pierce projectiles sometimes lingered around forever.
- When leaving your grapple state, Dawksin would play a jump start animation instead of falling.
On the slightly more exciting side, we continued iterating on the grappling hook to make it feel better to use.
You can control your direction while grappling more towards the beginning of the move, and as you get closer to your destination you get less control.
With the new addition of him tilting to match his velocity we figured his animation could look a little better, so we went ahead and updated that, and made it so you kick off the wall automatically.
Reticles
Next up was tackling the reticle for the grappling hook.
If you tap to activate grapple, you can target enemies, whereas if you hold to activate grapple, you grapple to terrain.
Since these are two different abilities smashed into one, we needed to communicate when you can activate either one, so we updated the HUD to accept multiples reticles per ability.
This let’s us do some fancy stuff. 😀
I’ve increase the size of the reticle so we can see what’s happening.
- So now as you move over enemies you can see that they are within grapple distance.
- If you move over terrain it highlights in yellow
- And as you get closer, you can see they are within Pierce’s distance
Icons
I also started updating icons with more final art, and updated them to show how what state the ability is in.
Now during an ability we can say things like: This ability is ACTIVE! or you can RE-CAST this ability! or This ability is unavailable, or on cooldown, etc.
Stowing/Sheathing
Since we gave Dawksin a new state where he can sheathe his weapons, we started experimenting around with how this would work.
Initially we tried something like this where he would periodically sheathe his blades, and this little indicator would let you know when it was going to happen.
This wasn’t great though since it ended up being pretty distracting. It would also prevent you from doing any abilities while this was happening which didn’t feel very good.
So the next approach was to have him automatically stow his weapons when he performs an ability, which ended up not only feeling less intrusive, it also gives the player a chance to control when this happens.
The whole point of this anyway was to give Dawksin a damage boost when his weapons are sheathed so he get’s a little more upfront damage since his overall damage is low because he has so much power packed into his Recall ability.
And finally to support this, I added a simple way to mark certain frames in our animations as either charge attacks, or empowered attacks, and they’ll reference a handy little table to lookup what kind of damage boost you get.
And that’s about all I had time for this week.
Oh also this week was the end of our kickstarter, and we made the goal!
We can’t thank everyone enough for helping us out, and we’ll keep doing our best to make sure y’all get a cool game :>
See y’all next week