Hello everyone,
Over the past four years I have been developing lightsaber fighting games, with the past 3 being lock on focused through my series Sabers Unleashed. Two years after making Sabers Unleashed II and after many retries of designing and crafting the third, I finally have a system that I think works best as a finale and send off to the series. I wanted to showcase that system here and explain why I like it so much.
Throughout my previous games my design was more limited by my scripting capabilities. I would rush through some features or not think through certain design choices, compounded by my mess of spaghetti code. This time, after focusing on polish and simplicity, I managed to create something that not only outshined the previous system’s mechanics, but its polish and pacing were much better.
In this system you have 4 basic combat controls, as opposed to the previous 10+. Attack, Attack Cancel (Feint), Dodge, and Jump. The focus here isn’t just on the combat interactions but movement as well, something I had critically overlooked in previous entries. By increasing the movement possibilities and toning down the amount of actions a player can do in just the combat while increasing the overlap between them, I was able to make a system much more complex than the previous systems while being extremely simplistic and approachable. You can jump and dodge to perform flips, attacking during said flips, bait combos by feinting and using the movement to express that, you can chamber and parry attacks, both mapped to one button that changes based on your attack direction (contextual inputs).
As well as this, I made some UI changes. The guard wheel is 360 degrees, allowing for upward swings and adding further complexity while keeping the approachability. The stamina is no longer a bar in the corner of the menu but a wheel inside of the guard wheel, inspired directly from BOTW. I made this change because most of the time player’s eyes are glued to the directional guard wheel, and hopping back and forth between the corner and guard wheel would be less convenient that if it were right next to it.
These were some of the changes and design choices I made, and as well as this I am planning on having this be my final Star Wars themed fighting game. I would love to hear any thoughts or feedback on this, as anything said will ultimately help craft a better game.
Thanks for reading