May 19th Weekly Update (Patreon)

Another good week!  I was able to get the rig for the village girl started, and did some test deformations that turned out fairly well.   It still needs all the more fine adjustment stuff, like the facial animation, but otherwise its looking coming along fairly well!

As you can see from the video above, I've also got the basic shield spell in place and working.  While I'd like to have it eventually be able to reflect attacks or parry with the proper timing, for now it works well to block incoming attacks.  I have it bound to its own button.  In the future I might add different types of shields, but for now this will suffice.

Putting this together was harder then I initially planned.  I didn't want to just make the player invincible, and have all these attacks going through the shield.  What I had to do was freeze the animations of the attacks as they hit the shield so that it looks like a proper block.

I've also been working on the feel for melee combat.  I've been paying a bit of Mordhau, and a lot of that game's fun is how crunchy the hits feel.  I've been working to bring a bit of that into my game.  I already did some stuff like better hit detection, and effects.  I took some time this week and ramped it up a bit.  

Now there is a brief pause on hit to emphasize the hit, as well as increased effect size.  I've also changed the sound effects, although I'll likely play with different sounds to find the most satisfying one.  It'll be an ongoing thing, but I think this helps.

Finally I do want to get everyone on the same page of how everything works, so I'm currently building a tutorial/demo level to get the game mechanics down.  I'm going to have it broken up into sections.  

Here's a few of early shots of the layout on the platforming/movement section.

More next week, thanks again for all the support!