Hey one and all, my team and I have been working on a fairly unique combat system for PC(Correct me if I’m completely wrong).
We call it the CCS (Compass Combat System), think about a compass with lines from the center going North, North-East, East, South-East, South, South-West, West, North-West.
8 Directional. Each direction has its own animation of the character swinging in that direction.
Now we have developed a system in which whatever way you “swipe” on screen is the way you swipe your weapon, that is all set up, however we are unsure of the smoothness of this combat, as it is First-Person RPG. The main idea behind this system is parrying and more interesting combat, for example :
Your enemy swipes down on the screen, causing a down swipe, then you respond quickly with an up swipe, parrying his move
What I am here to ask you is how do you think would be the best way of implementing this, with good playability.
I can see a couple of options :
Current -
Your mouse is locked in center screen until you decide to attempt combat, when you click the screen the player and camera rotation locks and you swipe the mouse from the middle point in the way you want to swing, the mouse then re locks to center and your character rotation is “unlocked”, we have found this to be alittle unplayable.
So what are your ideas for CCS? Do we just scrap it completely?
I think I will try wasd as its more simple for the player to master.
How do you think you would symbolise where the enemy is going to hit, or do we just make it based on guessing/picking out the direction when they start, reverting back to peoples reflexes?
Or would it get tiresome attacking a guy till they make a mistake?
Well fruit ninja in 3d fps would probably be fun for a bit, but I think it would get tiring fairly fast, especially if there are a lot of enemies or it takes a lot of strokes to kill someone off.
Personally I’d keep it for more minor actions, picking someones pocket, giving an NPC a non-deadly slap, throwing items etc.
Apart from that the biggest obstacles that I see are going to be controlling the player at the same time, first person hand to hand combat is notoriously nasty anyway, players always get annoyed by hit detection, targeting, arm reach and so on, adding in another variable (the location of the strike) seems like it could either solve some of this nicely, or make it even more complex and difficult and a pain in the ass to do, it depends on how you implement things and how tolerant your system is. Also how many strikes it takes to take someone down.
I thought it may get tiring and frustrating so thus I think I may also make a disable choice in which it just randomly choses a hit direction with no extra effort, problem with thus is that it affects combos.
As for endlessly swiping at enemies, that is to be expected when facing say A boss demon, butI think the use of combos will make this combat system allot more interesting.
The harder the enemy = more likely to “guess” your swipe direction and counter it.
Remember how old school rpgs had a cursed and you used the keyboard to turn?
What if you used a mouse interface that let you move a cursed around, but then gave it a box to work in. When you hit the edge of the box you started to turn. When you attack, you’d click the left button then made your swipe and release. Right mouse could do blocking.
The only issue is you’d need to figure out how to thrust.
