Welcome to my devlog on Knight Veil, i want to build up on the promising combat system I had initialised last week by diversifying the combat and polishing it. Using soulsbourne combat as the main insperation.

I wanted to incorporate a variety of combo systems that play unique light and heavy attack combo animations depending on the weapon equipped. I developed the heavy light attack combo by initially setting the left click as the input action trigger, for the heavy attack I created a unique input action where caps lock must be pressed simultaneously with the left click for the heavy attack to be performed. Additionally, I also included running, charged and air attacks to be performed.  After setting up the animation montages these animations were then included in the enumerator and specific data tables that are primarily focused on the weapons animation class.

After some playtesting, I noticed that my payer character can still perform the attack combos with no weapon equipped. To eliminate this design flaw I added a condition that the combat variable has to be enabled for the character to perform the attack. Furthermore, I also developed the player’s stamina depletion based on the different types of attacks the character performs, balancing this design aspect was rather challenging as if I made the stamina depletion for light attacks too low it could be easily spam, Mable, and if I make the stamina depletion for heavy attacks to high it can potentially be a major design flaw ultimately causing players to never rely on the heavy attack feature. Ight and heavy attack stamina depletion rates can’t be too similar, otherwise, players will favour using the heavy attack due to it dealing more overall balance. In summary, it took me a lot of trial and error to find a sweet spot regarding stamina depletion, ultimately improving the game’s overall performance and immersiveness regarding balancing capabilities.

Throughout the latter half of this week, I created a weapon collision system. I started by creating a collision component which allows the weapons to damage and attack things later on throughout the development of the game. I implemented start and end sockets on the weapons that indicated the trace of where the weapon starts and ends. For the collision to work, I turned on the weapon collision when the player attacked, this was implemented by creating an animation notify for the collisions so it can be placed in sections of the attacking animation montage. I was very careful to properly set up damaging actors for our character to damage and hurt other characters with the weapon system I developed.  I utilised a call damage event dispatcher that I referenced to damage an actor the character hits with their weapon. I gave the dummy actor I set up a death system and a suitable ragdoll animation whenever they enter their death state which further helps with the immersiveness of the project. Lastly, I developed the damage system and made attacks do a different amount of damage. The damage dealt has to reflect the amount of stamina depleted in terms of it being a fair amount for the stamina that was drained, this ensures players are satisfied with the combat system mechanics. 

After developing these key features I created a two-handed weapon and locomotion for it as it has its unique animation. The player characters’ normal locomotion is a stance where they are holding a sword and shields, which is odd since they are not carrying any weapons as of yet. To further improve the game’s design I created a locomotion where the player has no weapon stances equipped as long as their hands are empty. I created dual sword weapons and implemented a new unique sheathe and unsheathe animations for the duel swords and a new locomotion for it as well. I decided to implement hand-to-hand combat as this can be used by [payers who want to do a no build or no weapon run, and other players who are looking for more of a challenge by using the weakest weapon choicer in the game, in this instance I made that choice to be the fists and implemented combo attacks. Each unique weapon has a different stamina depletion rate to the next, this promotes consistent balance as their damage rates are also corresponding to the weapons type.

The overall system I put in place and polished can really go as far as the animation packs I choose to implement from the asset store, I also made sure to make all these components easily interchangable and dynamic so i can easily implement change in future play testing.