I’ve been working on combat for three weeks.

I’ve been working on combat for three weeks.

Mainly, teaching myself to animate better took up most of the time, though there was a lot of travel and busyness that got in the way too. But it feels good to finally be over the bumps. Now I’m at the point of implementing one feature after another, fixing bugs and so on, and it’s a bit of a relief!

One of the better bugs that popped up:

So there’s still work that needs to be done, of course. Hitboxes are a main focus, I’ve got some little movement glitches to clean up, and the animations will still need some polish. I’m actually only about halfway down the list on my combat checkbox, which includes some big changes to enemies and so forth (though to be fair the animation items were the most time-consuming, and I’m blitzing through the rest).

BUT.

Combat actually feels really nice and responsive already, and I’m extremely pleased it feels this good this early. I removed the “sword charge up” at the beginning, so the “wind up/anticipation” is really snappy. An attack will run through the entire animation, including a few “wind down” frames at the end, but if you use the sword again while still attacking, it’ll queue the next attack and skip the wind down frames (you can actually attack a lot faster than seen in the gif above).

This is a pretty big departure from the the old combat, which is more along the lines of Link’s Awakening (except it had a weird, very tiny combo input buffer that was really hard to hit):

(The sword is red because it’s a hitbox… sadly it’s not a lightsaber.)

I think this is much better: