Hello and a huge thank you to everyone for the continued support, for your questions and comments on all the social channels, you're the reason we're doing this!
For the latest update we have a combat presentation which should help explain the basics and direction we're going for design wise. We will make another combat update where we talk a lot more about the ideas we have for making it deep and engaging, for example via being able to craft/modify your weapon, plus we'll show a lot more fighting than just 1 duel - we want to show a lot of different variations of how an encounter can go about.
For those pondering about the part regarding faking/fooling your opponent by switching attack direction, this is called a 'feint' (Wikipedia - Feint: An offensive movement resembling an attack in all but its continuance. It is an attack into one line with the intention of switching to another line before the attack is completed. A feint is intended to draw a reaction from an opponent. This is the ‘intention’, and the reaction is generally a parry, which can then be deceived.)
What you see below is a demonstration of how you can freely choose between any attack angle, this also serves to show how you can perform a feint as explained above. We plan to balance feinting so it doesn't turn into spam.
We're ears open for suggestions, feedback and concerns, feel free to share everything with us.
Stay tuned for more updates, and don't forget to stop by our Kickstarter to check out the whole game!
Enjoying the ground textures too actually!
Thank you Pixelbombgames! Everything you see is homemade! We'll improve the textures further though, a lot, plus we haven't added decals to the engine yet.
aaah I've thought of something like this many times thinking about better combat than other games right now. wish you all luck since I cant support right now
Thanks for the support emptyDnik :) give us a share somewhere if you're able to, helping spreading the word is a just as huge help.
You said good block and bad block. You should have an adrenalin system. What I mean by that is I got a good block out of it. Now i should have an adrenalin boost to maybe punch or kick the other player. Like a counter or a fast movement to change the dynamics of the fight. Nothing to where it would hurt him bad. for example he swung at me I blocked it right off the bat. It was a good block now my adrenalin is kicking. I quickly hit him to back him off. It would say, kind of change the aggressor or how to engage your opponent.
We definitely want to add features that really lets you feel a fight changing pace as you or your opponent perform better. We're not super fans of stamina, at least not in its traditional sense, but something in that regard to balance out SOME features, but never attacks/blocks because the player should be free to fight at any time. It will also never be something like debuffs or buffs in a more MMORPG sense. We want to keep it within the realm of realism but with a focus on it first and foremost being fun to play.
All of it will be play-tested with the community too, to ensure that we get some good feedback to properly fine-tune everything. We won't always get everything right and that's when we trust our community to tell us so we can fix it.
It looks amazing!
This looks very, very, very good.
I'd (personally) love to also see the combat also take armor into account very heavily. Chainmail should be much more protective from cutting and slicing, but not from thrusts and spears.
Greathelms should be vision limiting, but the head would be completely undamageable save for blunt weapons like hammers or maces.
Blunt weapons would maybe be very slow but could break blocks and do damage with or without armor.
Spears should be fast and hard to block; and as smakadorezz said a good fatigue/stamina system would do much good to reduce spam-ability.
The idea of punching or "Dirty fighting" is quite cool too. Maybe find a way to introduce daggers or knives?
This is all just my own ideas, by no means right or not but I'll be telling my friends about this game, it looks incredibly promising!
Dirty fighting is actually something we've talked about, being able to use daggers/knives in specific places, or perhaps overall. That's on the drawing board though and we would first need to add one of our dagger models into the game and test it out with some moves etc. I don't expect that to happen for a good handful of months just yet.
Does your engine have a name?
And will it be accessible to the public?
We have not named it yet, thought of some names but we never had time to discuss it really, always felt our time was better spent on developing.
The engine will be accessible to the public, modding is a big part of the it and we want to support it fully. We will also release a big part of the code for Melee Battlegrounds to help everyone get started - MBG is actually made in our modding API for the engine.