Games Practical Project Development Blog - Week #9

This week was a bit slower than the previous couple of weeks, going back through existing mechanics and improving them in various ways, and continuing to polish the look and feel of the game.

After some more playtesting at the start of the week, it became apparent that making sure the player was visible behind walls was important to both the game feel, and players ability to keep track of the gameplay depending on the abundance of walls generated for the level.

The Material Blueprint for the outline shader, wouldn't have been possible without Tom Looman!

Not being super knowledgeable with more complicated materials, I looked back on some documentation from Tom Looman, a game developer with experience as an engineer for Epic Games. I have used this outline and opacity shader before, and I realised it would be perfect for keeping the player noticeable during the action at all times, to help keep players focus point where it needs to be during gameplay.

The outline/opacity shader that makes use of custom Stencil depth

After this, I once again went back to the combat, still not being satisfied with the way it felt. I decided to look closely at the main inspiration for the core combat gameplay, and even the camera angles used in the game, so I started rewatching gameplay from The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds. Dissecting this combat, I gathered the following info:

The combat needs to be very fast and responsive to the button press

The player needs to stop moving while swinging to help both aim the attack, and sell the weight of the swings.

So I decided to replicate this within my system, to see how it feels.

While this definitely works for Zelda, I'm still not sold on the feel of it within my own project, I think it will require a lot more tweaking and testing before I can finally call the combat finished, at least as finished as a single mechanic can be on a 3 month project! This is something I've been trying to remind myself recently, as I worry I'm getting disappointed by some problems in my project, and spending too much time trying to fix these problems, when compromises will have to be made if I want to be able to complete my project and have everything to a similar standard.

Setting up these changes to the attacking mechanics was a simple addition, however it was while testing this, I began to worry about the framerate of the procedural generated level, oftentimes dipping below 30 fps, which is unacceptable in my opinion, so I began trying different ways of optimisation, and reached out to a few people I know. Unfortunately, I have yet to find a substantial solution to the problem, so that will be what I'm researching mostly going forward.