De-Railed: Player Combat Design Postmortem
Alrighty, so I meant to do this earlier but work got pretty insane. So this is a quick and dirty design postmortem, I'm gonna lay out the decisions that went into De-Railed. I'm not gonna say I accomplished every goal, or even did everything particularly well, but I love chatting design and want to lay my thoughts out for folks who may take an interest.
One of the first Combat Design Decisions was: This character is not a soldier. They should not be able to tear through enemies quickly, and their hit points should be beefy enough to be forgiving, but low enough that if a player wants to run from combat they have enough time to do so. The level design was intended to funnel players into dangerous zones, but to give them opportunities to flee, hide, etc.
Melee Attacks
To Accomplish the Clunky, slow, unweildly feeling I wanted out of Melee, I decided early on to do a few simple things.
A) I set it up so that a Melee Attack would halt your horizontal Movement. This means you can't just "Hack and Slash" Run through the level, you need to time your attacks. I did not however, stop vertical movement, so it remains possible to jump up and slash at a target hanging out on the ledge.
B) Animation Commitment: Attacks take a Loooooooong time to complete, and once you attack, you have to wait until the animation completes before you can take other action, and you cannot cancel the attack. There's also a cooldown after attacking before you can take action.
C) Melee Attacks do 2 Damage to Ranged Weapon's damage of 1. This translated to general play as players shooting wildly at a target, and finishing the enemy off with a Wendigo as they don't have enough time to shoot the enemy enough to kill it before it reaches them.
D) The Weapon Attack Box is pretty small, and extends only as far as the very edge of the weapon. It's also only around for a single frame.
Ranged Attacks are designed less around animation commitment, and more around giving the player a choice in the accuracy of their attacks, they can either have highly accurate fire, or highly inaccurate but fast fire. It's a difference of a little over half a second, but in that time the enemy can close rapidly once disturbed. My intended play was that the first shot players took they would wind up, think about what they were doing, and then fire after a full second or so of aiming. I however, didn't want to penalize players too much for RNG making it so shots would "Barely Miss", so I applied light homing to the projectiles , as you can see in the editor view with the purple lines.
I think this is where I made the biggest mistake in that I didn't adjust the health pool after testing. I set the HP Amount at 5 early on because it was a good square number, but I didn't have enough time to really test how this played. I honestly think at this point I should have lowered the HP Amount to 3. Health Packs were added at the last minute (Really the last Hour, but still), and threw off the way the game played and I never revisited it.
The Cutting Room Floor: Earsplitter Bombs
If you're on controller, pressing (Y)/(▲) will reveal that I left this ingame, it was originally intended to cause the Wendigo to flee from an area, but it ended up getting cut at the last minute because the logic caused some really weird movements. If i had been more clever and less sleep deprived, I would have converted them to a flare of some kind and left them in, but alas, Hindsight is 20/20. My original intent was to make these very limited in use, they actually exist as a GUI Element and pickup-able item but it was disabled before I built the game.
1) Have a better Sprite Animation System. I had to cobble that together at the very last minute and it sucked.
2) Spend more time generating content and interactables. The character system is very overbuilt for what exists in the world to form interactions.
Hope folks find this interesting. Chat me up here or on Twitter (@OccultGameDev) to talk design!
