This was a fairly productive week. I finished all of the outstanding prototype animations for the enemy entity I’ve been working on and implemented them into the game, where they mostly look pretty good. The new idle animations definitely have a lot more character than the previous still frames.
I just started overhauling the way attack knockback works to make the results more consistent: Previously, the angle it pushed the target in would be based on the relative position of the two entities, which is occasionally the desired behavior but mostly just makes things weird and inconsistent when it comes to player melee attacks. If I left it that way, you’d be able to knock an enemy directly up into the sky by attacking from a low angle — kind of neat in the abstract, but in practice it looks goofy. Now, knockback is tied directly to the attack type, so a standard melee attack will always push opponents in the same direction by the same amount. Of course, I can still choose to intentionally do interesting things with the knockback angles, and currently the rising attacks have strong push in the upwards direction, with a corresponding downwards push for the falling attack. I don’t know if these will be interesting and useful in practice, but finding out will have to await playtesting.
Next up is to spend a bit of time testing and polishing this entity’s movement to make sure I’m satisfied with where it’s at, and once that’s done I can start in on the alternate versions. The first couple are pretty straightforward, and will only require minimal new animation and programming work: A throwing animation will be required for both, and all of the other animations will have to be tweaked to account for a different weapon for the other, but compared to some of the extra work that will be required by other variants this is very minimal. I think I can have at least one done by end of week, and the other well underway.
Feeling a bit stressed and overwhelmed at the moment. Trying to put solid hours in on this at the same time as I’m trying to get stuff done by end of month and making rent is taking a bit of a toll. Oh well, it’ll be fine in a week or two. I wasn’t sure if I would be able to get a piece done for yesterday and ended up with a pretty solid 1000 words, so I think I’ll be fine.