Combat Demo DevDiary

Week 1

This week, we decided on our game's genre and the combat system. We want to make a third-person action game. The main combat loop of the game will be to use normal attacks to accumulate energy to use skills. In addition, we also discussed the perspective, camera, lock, dodge, and potential VFX of the game and had a preliminary plan. These plans may change at any time during the production process, but they can help us better understand our game framework.

During the production stage, we implemented the character's Run, Sprint, and Jump. The beginning of Sprint will be a Dash. It will be the Dodge action of our game, and the player will be invincible at this time. In addition, I also implement animations for run and jump. Sprint state does not have animation yet, but we will add it in the future.

Current progress video

Next week, we plan to use GAS to configure the attributes of our character and make the basic normal attack.

Week2

Discussion

In the discussion part, since we are going to use GAS to store the attributes of the Actor in our game, we first need to identify all potential attributes. We made a table to record all the attributes that may exist in our game.

 

Production

In the production part, as an engineer, I mainly completed two parts of work this week. The first is to replace the animation assets. The attack action of our previous assets does not have root motion, which does not meet our expectations. We reselected the attack animation with root motion and replaced it. In addition, I modified the logic of Dash in our game. The previous Dash was made using the Character Movement component, but this may not match the animation effect. I replaced it with a montage containing root motion. The other part is that I used GAS to configure the attributes for the player and enemy characters and made the damage of the attack. Furthermore, I used the Motion Warping plugin to create an attack-targeting effect, ensuring that players attack the closest enemy.

 

Next week's plan

Next week, I want to add more effects to the character's attacks to enhance the overall feel. For example, camera shake, hit stop, VFX, and SFX, among others.

Week3

Discussion

In the discussion part, we had an in-depth discussion regarding the trigger conditions and status requirements for character skills, as well as the various enemy types within the game.

 

Production

In the production part, I reworked the character's blueprint.
I watched this video.
https://youtu.be/QLbj7SWpnCw?si=xypR_2b9oKsWLwdT

Through this video, I learned more about the GAS tag. I used GAS Tag to replace a lot of Boolean values in our game before and reworked all player behaviors except the camera into game ability.

Now it looks like this:

This is the previous Dash check:

Obviously, GAS is a more convenient method for management and later maintenance. I no longer need to modify the previous branch nodes; I only need to add new tags. This is more in line with the open-closed principle.

 

Next week's plan

Next week, we plan to finish working on the rest of the character's skills, and if that goes well, we hope to also tweak the feel of the skills.

Week4

In this week's development, I have mainly completed three tasks. First, based on the feedback from last week's play test, I modified the interruption logic between actions. Now if the player continues to hold down the forward key during the dash, the dash action will be interrupted in advance, instead of waiting until the action ends to enter the sprint state. This modification makes the actions smoother and more coherent. Second, I added a new attack method. In addition to the normal attack of continuous clicking, our character now has a new charge attack of long pressing the attack key. Third, I did some research on the Game effect execution classification class and wrote a simple script. Now the damage judgment of our game can be dynamically changed according to the current tags on the player and the target.

New Attack

Week5

This week, I mainly completed the following work.
First, the character's movement. I used animation notifications to add footsteps. This animation notification will detect the ground, and footsteps for different materials can be added in the future. In addition, I added a special effect when sprinting.

Second, I added some polish to the character's guard state. When the current defense is successful, the character will play a successful defense animation with corresponding SFX and VFX.

Guard State

Finally, I changed the character's attack detection from using overlap collision to using ray trace, which can help us effectively obtain the hit position so as to better add VFX when the attack hits. Additionally, I added a motion blur effect to the attacks using the Post-Processing component. 

Week6

This week, I made the following improvements based on the feedback from playtests. First, lock. The previous lock is similar to the logic of Dark Souls. That is, the camera always locks the enemy in the center of the screen. However, according to the feedback from playtests, this lock method is not suitable for our game. Because the enemies in Dark Souls are generally larger than the player, there will be no situation where the player blocks the enemy, but the size of the enemies in our game is similar to the player, so if the player character locks the enemy head-on, it may block the enemy and affect the operation. The following is the old version of the demo:

old version of lock

Finally, we got inspiration from Ghost of Tsushima and Rise of the Ronin and changed the game's lock perspective to the side direction. That is when locked, the character is always on the left side of the screen, and the enemy is on the right side of the screen. We found that this not only avoids occlusion, but also strengthens the sense of confrontation in the game. The following is the new version of the demo:

new version of lock

In addition, another feedback we received was that the game's rolling and locking movement steps were a bit strange. Therefore, we separated the logic under normal and locked conditions. Currently, in normal conditions, the character rolls and rotates to the rolling angle immediately, and moves to the corresponding direction. In terms of animation, all animations are essentially forward. When locked, our movement and locking will be different animations in four directions. The following is a new version of the demo:

new version of movement

Week7

This week, I completed the ability to fire sword energy with normal attacks. This GA is based on a buff that lasts for 15 seconds. If the player holds this buff, they will fire additional sword energy with normal attacks. We hope to obtain this buff after using the ultimate skill, but our ultimate skill has not been completed yet, so I use the debug key to trigger this buff. My plan for next week is to improve the character further, add the ultimate skill, and improve the logic of being hit.

Fire Sword Energy