To help build the battle gauntlet, I’ve been looking back into designs from books such as Game Feel: A Game Designer's Guide to Virtual Sensation (Swink, S., 2008) to ensure the combat and progress (although limited) feels great to do so.
When dealing with player input, they need to completely understand what their actions are, how they know they're doing it, and the results of it being done. Doing so will give their input choices more weight and ensure they feel like they have agency in their actions.
In Players Making Decisions (Hiwiller, 2015) the anatomy of choice is dissected into 5 areas:
Before (Prior Knowledge to the actions)
Communication (Clarity that this action exist)
Action (Tangible input from the Player)
Consequences (Future Outcomes made from the Action)
Feedback (Perception of these consequences)
These steps are used throughout all inputs throughout production to ensure features are clear and feel good, using techniques from more known titles performing similar actions to ease understanding to content, such as colours and sounds to maximize sensory feedback.
Below, I'll be giving a quick run through on how these were targeted in development.
GIVING AGENCY
As Combat is the Player's primary action set, it needs to feel satisfying to use so I can design challenges around it.
If the Player enjoys the feel of the input, their motivation in the game becomes intrinsic and they'll desire to continue playing. To do so, combat must need entertain their senses.
Mixamo (Adobe) free animations were used to pose the character to let the Player know they've activated an Attack input. 3DS Max is also used to adjust impact frames by using elements of the 12 Principles of Animation, predominantly Squash and Stretch and Exaggeration to push the silhouette of the chosen tiny characters (due to their shapes being blocky) and Anticipation to lead into and hold frames during key action frames for readability.
Squash is then further pushed in-game by adjusting the Z-scale during critical actions.
These actions frames are an element expected in Fighting Games as the Player's Input feedback: Start Up, Active, Recovery, and the result on an enemy: Stun (Hit).
These areas are a section of the feedback clarity as mentioned by Hiwiller, where upon performing the Action a series of outcomes are preformed to allow the player to understand the weight of the action before continuing onto the next one.
You can find more breakdowns regarding giving fighting game animation weight, such as How to Animate a Smash Bros Attack // Link (New Frame Plus, 2018).
To push the limited asset for the project, a subtle jitter/shake on meshes were added during the Stun phase to showcase this time until they've recovered from the damage.
Originally, the plan was to use Screen Shake to maximize game-feel quickly, but due to being a shared-cam multiplayer title any unexpected feedback would easily cause nausea (e.g. Player 2 experience the Shake when Player 1 takes damage), so shakes were placed locally instead.
Additionally, dynamic materials were used to swap out Character meshes with Hit Flash colours upon damage knock-backs and particle effects spawn to make the action pop, using thick cartoony visual effects purchased from the UE4 store to aid the response connection to similar titles, such as winning a fight in The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker (Nintendo, 2002).
Sourced sound effects also play for each action to add some audio feedback, using Smash Bros. for Wii U (Nintendo, 2014) as project examples for crunchy but light-hearted sound effects to match a game of this light visual style.
UNDERSTANDING THREAT
Though many of the effects mentioned previously apply to Enemies too, there are a few variations that are performed to make sure they're clearly a threat, as mentioned in Hiwiller's stages.
As an introduction into combat before the Player performs an Action, the enemies give the Player enough time to understand the combat phase as initiated by triggering a change in camera angle to add the danger to the on-screen focal list array and by performing animation/audio feedback with the state change: you've been spotted by someone, prepare for battle. As this isn't a stealth title, the camera motion is designed to be subtle enough to not promote an espionage mentality (e.g. Metal Gear Solid's sharp alarms when spotted).
If the foe does reach the Player, they'll display a red warning outline and flare using a fresnel effect on their dynamic Material before performing their attack animation. This feedback is something seen in many action titles such as PlatinumGames titles where the Player can find themselves fighting alone against many foes but need assistance to know who to watch first.
To ensure the player has enough time to respond with either a dodge or a counter, AI attacks use animation notifiers to tag the attack trigger, and a Custom (local) Time Dilation to slow the AI down slightly.
In regards to the camera angle, alternative games where multiplayer players are fighting at the same time were researched on how they handle action clarity. Due to the pseudo turn-taking nature of tab-targetting MMORPGs, many attacks are depicted as a visible Area-of-Effects (AOEs) during an animation wind-up before the attack is performed to add to the rhythm of the encounter.
As these can be abused visually if used incorrectly, I decided to do some tests to see how they'd work in this project for the case where a larger attack would be coming but I didn't have the animation and assets to display the severity of the threat.
AOEs were made in 3 primary criteria based on their desired action response:
Lane/Rectangle (Move to the side)
Radial (Move outwards)
Ring/Doughnut (Move inwards)
The simplest example an AOE use would be if a Bomb was going to explode, rather than only using flashing and pulsing (which doesn't offer any sense of detonation time), a radial area around the Bomb would show the blast radius, as well as act as a timer from it's shape fill without the need of text.
Same as if an Enemy was preparing to shoot a powerful blast in a straight line (Lane AOE), or if the Player had to find the eye of a storm to avoid damage from the edge (Ring AOE).
They're not my favourite form of attack tells, but in the possibility of 4 or more combatants trying to enjoy themselves all on a single screen, it was worth the precaution to test and build attack Blueprints dynamically around these shapes then hide cast visuals if not preferred during a QA feedback session.
Next...
I hope that wasn't too much to digest! There's a ton of small tidbits here and there that help bring the gameplay feedback to a complete system, but with this I hope you've enjoyed the peak into the workings of how to make sure the combat system feels good. I'll go into more detail with the Player's actual moveset in the future. Until then~
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