Episode 2, Update #11

Salutations and apologies for the long post!

-Progress-

Last week, I've been trying to get as far as I could with the fighting game. I was hoping to be finished with a complete version by this weekend, but I didn't make that deadline. An idea on paper usually seems so much easier until it slowly becomes a reality. There are so many factors you have to consider and often simply don't think about, until you actually start developing. Fix one issue, and another rises from that previous issue. Sometimes several hours can be spent on trying to figure out why a part of your code doesn't work, while it works perfectly fine under different circumstances, only to find out that you accidentally added an extra symbol on a line that doesn't belong there. 

Adding buttons to make moves active and inactive, is not that hard. To make it work correctly, it needs to disable the right things, which adds another layer of complexity etcetera, etcetera. I also needed to find a way to limit certain powerful moves, because in the end why not equip the most powerful move 3 to 5 times right? I've added a point limiter to prevent this issue. A jab, which is an effective but fairly weak move costs you 1 point compared to a haymaker, which does a huge amount of damage for 5 points. You start with 7 points to assign, and this makes you think twice on how to assign your moves and not brainlesly add a haymaker or flying knee in all slots for maximum easy damage.

The whole idea on paper was designed from the player's perspective and I completly forgot to think about the opponents' perspective. It needs a simplistic form of AI, to decide what it can do from any given position when it's the opponents' turn. This is something I'm setting up at the moment.

-Change-

Although in general I'm very pleased with how it works, I will change the system a bit so that you can get more out of it. Once I had a complete version of the standup ready with a bunch of renders to see how it looks, it became apparent that it wasn't enough.

So far, I've shown you that you can make your own combo for standup, clinch and on the ground. Seeing the same combo throughout the entire fight is not very exciting, so I was trying to find a way to make it more interesting. There are many moves available to you in the standup, but in the clinch and ground not so much. I think it's a good idea to cut the clinch and ground ones out, and make those moves available as a choice during the fight instead, since they are so few. Doing it this way, opens up the space for two additional standup combos instead, which allows for a much larger and interesting variety that you can set up . In short, instead of 1 combo in the standup, you can set up 3 instead. This will unfortunately take some more time to do as I have to shuffle things around.

-Final word-

Anyway I've bored you enough with the troubles of game dev, it is as it is and I hope you can be patient with me as I progress further this week. The good news is that this is likely the most complex part of the whole game and once it is fully working, it is done for the rest of the game.

I managed to snag up a shiny new 4090 as well and making renders is a breeze. It easily cuts my render time and level of comfort in half which I'm very pleased with.

Have a good week and thanks again for your patience!