3D Rad Goblin bashing

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1aUJc3SXIjfkJuFk-a87yb1Mky6CtF84w

Hi and happy new year to all

Im here with a different project this time. i always wanted to do fighting mechanics in 3D Rad. and Ive finally found a way to do it, even though its not as good as any other game, but i think the basics are there. feel free to give these goblins a bash . download is 48 mb , and unzips to 138 mb . controls are on the start screen , and there is an option to disable bloom. i was also playing around with pathfinder, so a bit of slowdown ( FPS) is expected due to computational requirements of pathfinder.

All that said and done, it ran at an average of 30 FPS on my Nvidia GT 620. So it should give reasonable fps to anyone with the equivalent or better than a GT 620. im sure on my Nvidia GT 9500, I would probably get an average of +40 FPS.

anyways enjoy. i know i enjoyed bashing some goblin sculls, for a couple of minutes. I also included basic sound effects and background music . Laters

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Comments

  • I ran this at 3840x2160 on a 1080GTX, and although it was very smooth, I saw a bunch of white pillars in the background that don't seem intentional.
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    I think that with your games in general, I find it really impressive just how much you tackle (programming, art, fx, audio), though in some ways I think it holds you back.

    Something that gets in the way of my enjoying the game and staying for longer is that I find it very difficult to understand the game's interactions. For example, when I'm using Attack Set 0, Left Click, I see the start of an attack animation, but if I just click once, the attack doesn't seem to complete. To play the whole attack animation, I seem to have to mash Left Click multiple times. This isn't intuitive to me. In fact, the animations overall felt like they all should have been 2-4x faster. (It's not lag; the framerate is super smooth on my machine.)

    For action games (or games in general, really), you usually want a clear, direct mapping between input and output. When I click a button for an attack, I should see the effect of my clicking (i.e. an attack animation playing) immediately -- especially if it's the first attack in the game that I'm likely to try out. (Slower attacks might not deal the damage immediately, but there should always be clear communication from the game that the press has been registered. In animation-speak, that means moving to the "anticipation" frame(s) almost immediately, even if it means snapping the character to that. And then, in contrast, enemies may have slower/lengthier anticipation animations so that the player can learn to react to them. (These are very common in action/arcadey combat games, and may not hold true for more realistic combat simulators, but your game seems like the prior given its aesthetic and smaller range of animations.)

    The idea of switching between attack stances/sets is pretty cool, though aside from a difference in animation I couldn't really tell what difference they'd make, so I mostly felt like I'd switch between them randomly rather than having a specific strategy.

    As I moved around, the camera felt like it got more and more cumbersome, tending to look where I didn't want it to (e.g. in the screenshot above). On a PC, I mostly expect the camera to be controlled with mouse movement, and A and D to strafe rather than turning my character. Are there reasons for adopting the controls you picked?

    I'd like to see you work on something where you go all-in on one particular thing. For example, you seem to care a lot about performance (and I know you've suffered from lots of overdraw in some of your previous games), but performance should really only be a problem you're trying to solve once you're doing something that would stress a system with a really good reason (e.g. fighting hundreds of characters at once, or having realtime GI). Especially when you release games that hope to make a bit of money (as I know you've done in the past), games really struggle to stand out if everything is "just okay" or mediocre, and "it runs smoothly" is kind of a bare minimum of expectations: it's not something that's a selling point on its own. A gorgeous game may still sell despite mediocre gameplay, or a super fun game may still sell despite having mediocre (even awful) art, or a narrative game might sell because of a wonderful story despite barebones game mechanics and art -- but something, whatever it is, ideally needs to stand out. It may be worth thinking about what you'd have that thing be, and try and kick ass at that skill, even as an indie who likes to do everything.
    Thanked by 1Kulu
  • Thanks Elyaradine

    this was my first attempt at an action game. The earlier versions didnt have 'take damage' mechanics or animations. from my own observations. the character doesnt react to button presses because its busy taking damage at that time. so if you press the button repeatedly there will be a gap where the attack will be succesfull. so im just going to make all plaher attacks override the ' walk' and ' take damage' mechanics. this will give the player a big advantage . but you will see the effects of the button press. Ive actually done this already with the attack set 1 and right click . thjs is a special move that overides all other player mechanics until the attack is complete. the most successful attack is attack set 0 and right click, that one usually works 50 percent of the time.

    Thanks for the tips on animations I will definately try them. I was pretty happy when I got pathfinder to work, since its been one of the things I couldnt figure out.

    By the way , this build also runs on Intel Hd GFX , but slows down alot when pathfinder is confused.

    I dont know why those white pillars appeared , Im guessing I did something wrong with the camera. does it happen at lower resolutions?

    I guess when it comes to games I focus on delivering something that I can enjoy myself. that usually means I try and deliver a complete experience. but i will try a more focused approach. but im still learning the engine and various tactics on how to get the best out of 3d rad.

    Thanks for the comments. Much appreciated.
  • edited
    https://drive.google.com/open?id=1AfkP1IE33CEhvBLsnCdumrEUNey17l70

    https://drive.google.com/open?id=1op57Ab2JhVMhb6T-X99ESt_pdMEy-DUb

    Hi . this patch takes out the player 'take damage' mechanic. and makes attacks more responsive. there is a cool down between attacks though. so alternating between attacks in a button mashy way , will not show nice results. having said that , the attacks should be more visible when the button is pressed. The secound link is a smaller texture of the cave plants that are in the game. all installations are simple and easy to follow ( just copy and overwrite the files into the right directory , and thats it ). Laters
  • To be clear: when my input doesn't seem to trigger a full attack, this happens right at the start of the game, before there are any enemies around me, so I don't think I'm being hit-stunned at that point. :/

    Not being able to attack when you've just taken damage isn't a problem (this is common in games, so it's behaviour that I think people would expect), so much as communicating clearly that this is the case. It should be clear when you're in the middle of an attack animation vs when you're in a hit-react animation. I feel that your animations being quite slow made it unclear which state the character was in.
  • Thanks. I will try speeding up the anims and see.
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