Hi all,

This is update is going to be a quickie and I’ll start by telling you why. Most who follow me are very used to instant feedback loops. Typically, my series of posts go like this: “I have an idea!” -> “I made the idea work!” -> “Here are more levels using IDEA!”…and so on. Project CATAM isn’t like that. There are more systems involved. It’s a large world that requires a lot of visuals and we do not yet have an artist working on this full time (for the record, Ellian will be on board full time as of March).

Anyway, I’ll go over the pieces that I put together this week.

Systems Update

One thing that I’ve been dying to do is get the combat up and running. We are trying to incorporate a system that somewhat mimics the Z-targeting scheme in 3D Zelda titles. “Locking on” in a 2D side-scroller isn’t very intuitive so we’re sticking with a simple facing lock. If you hold the left trigger on the game pad, Crown won’t turn around no matter which direction you are pressing. You can use this to hold your shield up in the direction of enemies while fleeing, or use it to have interesting sword play with and enemy that moves around a lot.

This week I added the facing lock and the animations that go along with it. JW (Vlambeer) did a talk once that explained that you should always give the player a reason to NOT press buttons. This convinced me to lower the player’s max speed when they are in the facing lock state. You can see that in this GIF.

You will also notice that there is some sword stuff going on. I added a simple system that allows for entities to spawn additional bounding boxes for melee combat. The player currently has a 2-hit sword combo. Each swing has a different bounding box that spawns in front of the player and damages enemies.

Work in progress…

That’s all for now,

-Z