The final (~for now~) version of the east-facing sword attack!

The final (~for now~) version of the east-facing sword attack! I redid a bunch of details after 1) great feedback on the size of the slash and sword positioning, and 2) discovering the sword “smear” looked super weird when rotated 90 degrees for the south-facing attack.

My original thought was to make the sword smear and the sword into a singular hitbox. It would be the exact same animation in all four directions. This is what the old Zelda games did. However, the only thing I could get looking “right” at the time was about a 45-degree angle slash, which isn’t very powerful. Take a look at this old gif (the red is a hitbox test, not a lightsaber… although now that I mention it…)

What helped with the new animation is separating the sword smear from the actual blade itself. I decided that only the smear would be the hitbox, and the sword could just go wherever it looked best. (This idea actually came from Crawl–the game is a bit gory for me, but the artist has some great videosand articleson animation.)

It was a freeing decision, but still a bunch of work! Mainly because I’m still developing my animation skills. The current method is just to attempt every single combination of pixels that could possibly exist by brute force until something looks right. :) Needless to say, this one’s definitely been a lot of hard work and frustration. While there may still be stuff to do, I couldn’t be more pleased with how it’s turning out.

And it’s a big step in the redesign of the combat system–making it feel fluid and alive is a top priority!