So I've been in a development slump for the past few weeks. I've been trying to figure out why, and I usually go back to my SSJ1/3 videos for inspiration. I think it's because I'm creating a seamlessly enormous supply of work for myself, where as before it was all an illusion.
Before, I would go through jobs all the time. Script a little something in Unity, then hop over to Max and animate. But now, I am like "Okay, model ALL of these characters. Make ALL of these animations. Script ALL of this stuff" in sequential order. And it sucks... dick.
I think if I'm going to pull off recreating the entire story of DBZ within one game, I have to have fun with it. I have to take my time, but make progress at the same time. I figured that I could be cleaner with my work if I laid my plate out and ate through it nibble by nibble, but it's not working. It is working in the sense that I'm productive in chunks, but it is draining my motivation doing it. I think I'm going to go back to the way I did things before.
So, to start things off, Goku is animated. And with the new biped system, Piccolo is animated about halfway just from reusing animations. I'm gonna clean up my code so I can make it a little easier for adding new characters, but for the most part I'm reworking combat from scratch.
Okay, so the guy who wrote that above sentence was lying. Not from scratch, but reworked a lot. Basically, if you've seen the SSJ3 video on my YouTube page, you're going to be able to do those kind of combos.
Heavy attacks no longer are their own button, and with that special Attacks move over to RMB. Now, heavy attacks happen at the end of the LMB combo. They will still alter with the direction you press, but now you have to work for them.
With that, the up & down heavy attacks are changing in what they do.
On the Ground: Up attacks will knock people straight into the air. Down attacks will knock people into the ground after which they will drag for a short time.
In the Air: Up attacks will smash people diagonally upward, and down attacks will smash people straight down.
These two will also have a combo chain parented to them. If you press jump right after you either up attack on the ground, or down attack in the air, you will teleport/jump (depending on the character) to the person you just hit.
So let's say I'm fighting Raditz. I am about to finish my combo and do the up kick to finish it off whilst on the ground. He goes flying straight above me, so I press jump right after and I teleport to where his height, at which point I'm free to continue the combo however I chose.
It's literally the exact same thing as in the SSJ3 video.
Another thing will be some slow motion events prior to a Speed Melee engagement or Shock Exchange. But I want to keep that stuff on the DL, just to keep some interest here and there.
So with my new design philosophy, I guess I'm going back to basics. I'm gonna get new Goku working, who by the way looks really great in Unity, hands down the best model I've made to date, and then implement my new combat systems. There's a lot more to them, but as I said, DL.
So once that's all done, I'll play around with cut-scenes again, and get some Chi Chi animations going. I want to model my own Pterodactyls to fit my new style as well, so I'll do that in the near future.
I get that posting model pictures are boring and it seems like that's all I'm doing, but I promise I'm not. Plus, gameplay just looks better in video form, I can't do it justice with snap-shots.
This week will pretty much focus on me cleaning up the script though. It's not as fluent as I want, and going through 3,000+ lines for each character is too tedious, so there's no sense in letting it go on.
One thing I am interested in though, specifically from you guys, is if you think the special attacks should be chargeable until you release the button, or chargeable until their timer caps out past what would make sense. ie: Goku charging 4 seconds after he already finished saying Kamehame-.
So, shoot any suggestions you want. Any opinions you guys are interested in. I'm all ears.
As for chargeable attacks I say they should be released when you let go of the button, and damage is dealt accordingly to how long it was charged. Things like Kamehameha or Galick Gun should be shouted all at once when the attack is released. If you think about it, kamehameha is the only attack that they begin to say the name of before it is fired.
When will the next version release?