I finally played it with a friend! I have some thoughts if you’re still working on this.
I think the game still needs more work and polish before you can start monetization. A lot of mechanics, objectives, and game feel elements are missing and the main gameplay feels boring as a result.
For an action-combat game, a lot of the excitement comes from the feeling of the combat. This will include sound effects, visual effects, and animations–basically, a lot of player feedback or “juice” is required for an action-combat game to work the way that you want.
I can’t give a lot of specifics on what “juice” to add because it depends on the type of feeling you want in the game. But an important thing I like to do is figure out if the weapons are meant to be light or heavy and how much weight varies between each weapon. From there, I can figure out how strong or weak certain effects should be, and how slow or fast animations should be. This shouldn’t be restricted to just effects, so it should also affect the mechanics too, but the thing is currently I don’t know what are the exciting mechanics that you want to have in your game to make it stand out.
What do you want to be the most exciting part of your game? If it’s the combat itself, then the current combat really doesn’t stand out compared to FPS games with very basic melee swing mechanics. I repeat @30BL0X1 and @TomskiKiller’s comments about expanding on the weapon animations, weapon strikes, etc. But also, I think you need to figure out a central mechanic that will make your game stand out and it can’t just be “press mouse to attack every few seconds”, because that’s already so common.
When I was first working on my own first-person melee fighter, I had to research other first-person melee fighters and see how they stood out from FPS games. So one of the ones I researched was Red Steel 2 (WARNING that there is no blood but there is obvious sword violence):
This game was made for the Wii so the sword swinging is literal swinging of the Wiimote. But it also makes the swinging feel amazing, lots of effects, sounds, movement of the camera, and even a slow-down of animations. So the game makes you feel like a “samurai cowboy” through how the sword (and guns) feel.
I bright up Red Steel 2 since it’s a good first-person sword game, but also your game also takes place in a desert (at least when I played it). This may be a wild suggestion, but if the desert ends up important, you can use that as inspiration for how you want your game’s battles to feel: a desert sword fighter.
That’s just my 2 cents. If you’re still continuing this project, I am following it!
