Dev Log 5 - ROUNDING OUT DAWKSIN

This week was all about adding some finishing touches to Dawksin.

Some of the not-so-exciting things were some general bug fixes:

• Pierce projectiles sometimes lingered around forever.
  
• When leaving your grapple state, Dawksin would play a jump start animation instead of falling.

On the slightly more exciting side, we continued iterating on the grappling hook to make it feel better to use.

You can control your direction while grappling more toward the beginning of the move, and as you get closer to your destination, you get less control.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube] - (He also tilts in the direction he’s moving)

With the new addition of him tilting to match his velocity, we figured his animation could look a little better, so we went ahead and updated it, making it so you kick off the wall automatically.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

[h2]Reticles[/h2]

Next up was tackling the reticle for the grappling hook.

When the grappling hook hits something (either an enemy or terrain) you’ll automatically start moving towards the hook. I wanted the reticle to show what’ll be hit, and still be readable when you have other abilities like Pierce that also have a reticle.

I’ve increased the size of the reticle so we can see what’s happening.

• So now, as you move over enemies, you can see that they are within grapple distance.
  
• If you move over terrain, it is highlighted in yellow
  
• And as you get closer, you can see they are within Pierce’s distance

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

[h2]Icons[/h2]
I also started updating icons with more final art, and updated them to show what state the ability is in.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Now, during an ability, we can say things like “This ability is ACTIVE!” or “You can RE-CAST this ability!” or “This ability is unavailable”, or “On cooldown”, etc.

[h2]Stowing/Sheathing[/h2]
Since we gave Dawksin a new state where he could sheathe his weapons, we started experimenting around how this would work.

Initially, we tried something like this: He would periodically sheathe his blades, and this little indicator would let you know when it was going to happen.



This wasn’t great, though, since it ended up being pretty distracting. It would also prevent you from using any abilities while this was happening, which didn’t feel very good.

So the next approach was to have him automatically stow his weapons when he performs an ability, which not only feels less intrusive, it also gives the player a chance to control when this happens.

The whole point of this anyway was to give Dawksin a damage boost when his weapons are sheathed so he gets a little more upfront damage since his overall damage is low because he has so much power packed into his Recall ability.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube] - (Ability -> Sheathe -> Damage Boost)

And finally, to support this, I added a simple way to mark certain frames in our animations as either charge attacks or empowered attacks, and they’ll reference a handy little table to look up what kind of damage boost you get.



That’s about all we had time for this week.

We can’t thank everyone enough for helping us out, and we’ll keep doing our best to make sure y’all get a cool game :>

See y’all next week!