Swing and a miss…
This week in Sid’s Adventure I worked extremely hard at getting melee combat working. I have never done any sort sphere collision in an actual game before so this a bit challenging. Luckily there is an incredible community of people who offer advice and videos on the subject. The first thing I had to figure out was what did I was this melee attack to look like. Did I want something of an overhead swing? A horizontal swing? Did I want a different weapon to appear in Sid’s hand when the animation was played. For simplicity (as the first three months are not polished based) I went with an overhand swing with his gun still in his hand.
I’d say the most difficult part of this was tuning the player to use this new feature. There was a lot of extra work that went into it. It wasn’t as simple as “play an animation.” Here are some things I needed to tweak to make this work.
The player did not bend down or up when looking down or up.
This needed to be corrected with aim offset animations so that Sid was not swinging up into the air and doing damage to enemies below him.
The camera needed to be clamped on the yaw so that Sid’s spine didnt bend 90 degrees upwards and downwards
The sphere collision needed to be socket based to generate the collision data.
Not only did I spend time with the melee I also spent time working on tuning how everything felt. To me, this was the most impactful update I’ve made so far. The character felt like he was too close to the screen in previous builds, it also felt like the aiming was not accurate. Aiming lower to the floor at enemies resulted in bullets colliding with the floor and disappearing. I also finally added a jumping animation.
I also spent a lot of time revamping the damage system and enemy health system. I also added an emissive glow in the darker areas so that the player can see the enemies. It's small things but I think they will add up to a better experience.
The game is playing much better now. It feels like a real game! I’m happy with the progress I have made. I will admit that the amount of work ahead seems so larger, I am concerned about how much work there is to be done. I feel I may be entering a crunch period soon or negotiating with the producer on what should be included in the game when its complete.