Week 6 - Reintegration

This week, following playtesting sessions and gathering feedback, I mostly worked on fixing the issues with movement and combat we faced. I also started to implement the final boss, with the goal to create a lengthy and complex combat loop for players to better test combat flow following the fixes.

Starting with the playtesting session, I took part in a joint testing session with Herman, as both of us tested with Adrien. The test was conducted over Discord, with us sending Adrien the build of the game and him playing through it and voicing his thoughts, answering our questions. Adrien was more experienced with games, including Hollow Knight, so he provided a lot of valuable feedback. His main points of focus were with the combat, saying the speed was too slow and the hitboxes were too small. He also liked the concept of the level design, saying the goal of climbing up was clear, though found it a bit restrictive for what the movement allowed. He was also the one to point out that momentum shouldn't be cancelled for combat.

After we compiled all our playtesting sessions, I got to work on fixing the combat. First, I waited for Herman to make the hitboxes on the animations bigger before I would implement them. In the meantime, I changed the combat to allow for movement as the player moved. Immediately, this felt much better for flow. Once Herman changed the animations, I imported them to Unity, and changed the animations.

Some of the animations had different lengths than others. To preserve a consistent combat feel among all attacks, I made all attacks universally use four frames, by cutting frames I deemed unnecessary. This made every attack the same speed, and I could slow down the sample rate slightly while still making the attacks overall faster than they were before.

After the combat rework, I started the implementation of the boss. A few weeks ago, I designed the moveset, so I started to create the framework needed to implement those moves. Mainly, I was just setting up the states for the boss' state machine.

Actual implementation will continue into next week.

All in all, this was a big week for fixes. One of the issues for the playtest was that we didn't have enough of the game developed to properly test the game loop, as we were focused on getting the movement and level design down, so for the next milestone we will be aiming for more upgrades and a better fleshed out map so that we can properly test the core gameplay loop of ascending, fighting enemies, obtaining tinder and abilities, and dying. I also found that the animation while ground attacking doesn't look good while moving, so I have asked Herman to tweak it so that it flows better.

Until next time.