Next to platforming, the other most important part of the game will be its combat. The player will be engaging with enemies regularly throughout every level, so I felt this was something I should start focusing on as early as possible.
Attacking
To start with, I implemented a basic three-hit combo attack. Each attack animation in the combo has a Notify near the end that will reset the combo. The player has to press the attack button before this Notify to perform the next step in the combo.
During its animation, the player cannot move freely or jump. The idea behind this is to prevent the player from being able to attack and dodge simultaneously, and instead make them decide between the two depending on the situation.
However, there is a risk of this making attacks feel overly restrictive or stiff. To help with this, at certain Notifies (such as "SaveAttack" in the example image), the game checks for any inputs that were made during the attack, such as jumping or dashing. At these points the attack will be canceled and the action that was input will take over.
Targeting
At the beginning of every attack, the player can aim the character's direction.
However, if the player is not currently inputting any movement direction, the player character will attempt to aim towards any nearby targets.
Each attack also pushes any enemies it hits away slightly, to give impact to the hit. On its own though, this would eventually push the enemy out of the player's reach. To compensate, the player's attacks also move them forward slightly.
The exact movement and speed of the attack animations are something I'm still figuring out, and will probably take a lot of fine-tuning.
Health & Damage
Finally, I also added the basics of the health system into the game. Currently the player has 4 bars of health, and each time they take damage they will lose 1 bar. Losing all health results in, surprisingly, death.
Only the very basics of this system are here right now; the player won't even respawn after dying. I'm aiming to let the player upgrade their total amount of health bars as well.
That's everything for Week 2. Getting the attack combo system working took most of my time this week, but as its a core feature of the game it makes sense that it should get a lot of focus. Next week I'm going to start implementing collectable items, as well as refining the combat.