When we were met with this problem we were somewhat intimidated by it[At least I was!] From experience I know that having a player sprite that contained a large number of animations made future work on clothing and equipment a nightmare for most. This in itself played a huge role in our past failures- Scope.
In the past we added more animations but still lacked the understanding, or more often than not the experience to put it all together into a single cohesive combat system. This was seen with Spirit mostly. So with the possibility of walking down the same path with spirit age we decided not to rush into this. We needed to figure out how we could get better, less stiff animations without shooting ourselves in the foot when it came time to do overlays. We came up with a pretty clever way to do just this.
In a nutshell the method we came up with is partitioning the player sprite into sections. Arms, legs torso. With this we were given a little more freedom to create more fluid animations. What we learned is that the main torso animations were frequently just copy pasted and edited versions of other states. So you'd benefit from having few torso animations. The arms and legs were sometimes all that changed in an animation so with them separated we could pretty much mix/match the sprites we had and create animations at run time. This was a pretty huge deal as we could now get MORE animations in the game to help improve our visuals. Here's a comparison!
The first image shows our previous methods, Animations were fairly stale and simple. It ultimately led to us having to make some pretty big changes. The second image is what we currently have now thanks to the feed back we received last week. Well visual aside a lot of people have been asking for some insight into the current mechanics. As of this moment the combat is still no where near where we want it to be but here's a few tidbits:
Firstly our combat system is now combo orientated. We've taken HUGE amounts of inspiration from the console naruto games and street fighter here. Players will be expected to chain light, heavy and charged attacks to execute combos.
Light attack basic combo
This week we've only managed to get a single combo in.
At the moment basic combo which consist of three light attacks[left clicking] and finishes with a more powerful attack.
Heavy attack
The heavy attack would obviously hit much harder than your average light punch but there's a catch; Heavy attacks can only be used to start or end a combo. This is because they have a much longer animation. We spent quite some time trying to get the timing right! Anyhow, If you miss you're likely to get punished. Street fighter inspired here.
Guarding/substituion
Guarding at the moment simple reduces damage. However there's another mechanic that's also available to the player in combat. Everyone will have 3 substitution charges. They recharge while in combat[taking damage and dishing out damage goes towards restoring a charge]. Basically the system works much like a parry would. You time your opponents attack and guard at the right moment. Then you'd evade their attack and blink towards the direction of your cursor. Simple right?
This guy is obviously pretty bad!Secondary equipment[right clicking].
Secondary equipment will, for the most part be your alternate means of dealing damage or defending yourself. They'd mostly be ninja tools and various items available at your disposal. Right now the system is still pretty bare but you can pretty much see that certain ninja tools will be able to ricochet off of some surfaces. While not necessarily realistic in any sense we thought It'd be cool to have!
[Nudity alert!]
J aka Sullight has been busy with some misc animations for NPCs too!
With that here's some conceptual work of how we plan to introduce ninjutsu into the combat system.
This pretty much wraps up what we've gotten done this week. Once again your feedback and constructive criticism is all welcomed and appreciated!
P.S Oh and sorry for the nude player sprites! We didn't have time to update our clothing to match the new animations!
Looking forward to seeing how else the game grows. Keep up the good work.