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Update: The way the vignette effect was implemented depends on a quirk of an older version of PICO-8, and is no longer performant enough to run well. I plan on updating this with a new, more performant (and better looking) effect soon.
The controls aren't well communicated in-game yet, but can be loosely explained as follows:
- Press and hold ❎, 🅾️ or both buttons to enter or change between stances, each of which offers different attack and defense options.
- The current stance type is indicated by the color of your outline.
- ❎ for attack stance (purple, red aura)
- 🅾️ for dash stance (blue aura)
- ❎+🅾️ for bash + block stance (green aura)
- Release ❎ to Attack (Strike or Bash).
- Release 🅾️ to defend (Dash or Block).
- When held for a long enough time, a stance will transition into a more powerful version.
- Attacks and actions are indicated by the color of their circular icon: red for attack, green for bash, blue for block.
- Charged action icons are indicated by a gold border.
Regarding the combat model itself:
Each action has associated force, stability, and damage. When using an ability, that ability's stability determines whether you block incoming attacks. If your stability exceeds the force of an incoming attack, it is blocked, and you take no damage. If the force exceeds your stability, you will be stunned for a duration determined by the difference; you will also take any damage the incoming effect might cause. An ability's stability frames usually begin a few frames before its active frames; thus, two agents attacking each-other at the same time are likely to block each-other's attacks.
This is my first time trying something in PICO-8, and I figured I would go with something simple; implementing a soulslike combat system, or at least drawing from what I most enjoy about soulslike combat. In this case, that means slow combat with very limited 'reactive' options. Fortunately it's been going pretty well, though I have a lot of optimization to do if I want to scale up for a finished version.
Unfortunately, I can't really know what the control scheme or difficulty level is like from the perspective of a new player. The control scheme is pretty complex given the input limitations, with 10 different abilities tied to two buttons. Given that this is done in a way most people would find unfamiliar, and for a relatively unforgiving combat system, I'm very interested in hearing how people find it.
That tileset!! Love it!
I find the shadow noise to be a bit overdone.
(very neat codebase btw - with gazillions of tokens to reclaim ;)
Hu... I don't get the control scheme at all :/
The feedback (charging, blocking...) might be better expressed as icons maybe?
Thanks for the feedback, and yeah; I've been thinking about that. For the circular effect / action icons, I can and probably will replace them. I've had some icons for this, but haven't written any code to handle rotating them yet.
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Hopefully they'll be readable enough to convey 'attack', 'bash' and 'block'.
I think one of my other problems right now is that I'm not clearly showing what the auras mean. They're basically just there to telegraph actions and their timing (which is normally handled by having a variety of telegraphed animations).
I'm also considering a status indicator or text in the top left hand corner, to help explain what different stances and actions do.
note: You don’t need rotation, only 3 sprites per action (up, diag, right) and flip them in code.
note bis: realized you have many tokens left, you could certainly beef up the game in term of particles/juice/... Have a look at this pico classic: https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=4051
The blow/charge feedback is much simpler/clearer.
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