Research

Today I am a man on a mission.  That mission: to make it easier to actually hit your opponent with a slash.

I have a good basic idea of what I want to do.  If you imagine a guy slashing the sword from left to right.  In Determinance right now, to connect with this strike the sword must actually hit your opponent during it’s path.  It must be spot on, actually hit.

That’s realistic, but it’s too hard.  Not only is controlling a video game avatar considerably less casual than controlling yourself, but also lag in internet games means that hitting spot on means… hitting early.

So I’m going to try having the slash you have made – a box encompassing everywhere the sword tip went during the strike – persist as an object for a little while after you have slashed.  If this box hits your opponent then it counts as a strike.  That should make it considerably easier, and doesn’t compromise any of the freedom of control that is so vital to Determinance.  We shall see how it pans out.

As a side note, surely one of the best things about being a game designer is that playing other games counts as research – I’m about to load up old online-fighter staple One Must Fall Battlegrounds, to see if anything about their system jumps out at me.  I never really liked OMFB – I thought it did a lot of what you shouldn’t do in an online fighter – but maybe it’s time to see how they solved some of the network related problems.

See you on the other side.

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This entry was posted on Monday, July 24th, 2006 at 12:03 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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