Week Six: Menu navigation and attack polish

Alright this week was much more productive.

Things I was able to do:

• Polish hitboxes and attacking, attacks now have a wind up time and cool off period.
  • hitbox position is also easy to rearrange
• Local multiplayer! Yes this very important feature of the game is in fact implemented finally.
• Most of the combat system, all fighting interactions except for blocking and throwing are in place now
  • I still need to change the hitbox size for ducking to allow ducking under standing stabs.
• Complete a whole menu sequence that leads to the actual game starting, with reactive UI
• Made new placeholder sprites / animations for ducking and throwing

I did have a whole ordered list of things to do one after the other, but at this point things all seem so interdependent it's sort of become a giant blob of just TO DO .

HITBOXES:

As my lovely snipping tool diagramming shows, there are three general areas of attack (and some take up more than one)

A standing stab goes for the highest slot in position 1, so that it can be ducked as a soft counter

A standard slash sort of hovers around 2, but can include areas of 1 and 3

A low stab hits the 3 area, being low enough to jump over

You can also attack straight up (or down if you are midair), and those are just centered vertically.

The point of being able to jump/duck stab attacks is that a stab is blockable, but I feel like you should still take a little damage from blocking a stab, because they are pretty hard to pull off, and therefore would probably never be used if they could just be easily blocked and not do any damage.

MENU SEQUENCE

A lovely video for expedited viewing

It's pretty straightforward, but I thought it was a nice break from developing the fighting system for a minute.

Basically, there is a lovely default UI main menu, where you can press start. You are then led to a player join screen where each controller can join up, and then move forward to a map select screen, and play the game from there.

Making this really simple (and sort of rushed) menu sequence was a breath of fresh air and helped me get back into the mood of developing the fighting system, and so I made a couple quick sprites for the new ducking functionality and thrown weapons, and I'm ready to jump into finishing that next.

The labeled 1 and 2 sections in the first image up there are just two areas that I am planning on putting some option type information, like maybe choosing character color or name or something like that. I just made it with enough room to fit whatever I decide to put.

And that's all for this week, next week might not be too fruitful, but I have a break from school coming up soon and I should be able to make big progress during that time.