So, as I've been recently testing my game I have noticed a couple things I havent achieved to the extent that I wanted to. Im talking about the combat. It's obviously not complex but I think the weakness of enemies and the savage finishers help keep the combat looking good and push the aggression that I want the player to have. But, I wanted ways to make the combat more aggressive or just more fun in general. So, where did I go to find information about making a third person, aggressive combat more engaging and overall better? God of War of course. I downloaded their lead combat designer's GDC presentation (Sheth, 2019) and read through it for some insight and inspiration. I was not disappointed. Most of it was too technical for my project especially regarding enemies and AI and positioning etc since I have never delved into AI properly before this and creating a grid in a Navmesh and using maths to distribute "aggression tokens" amongst enemeis to control how aggressive they are and when they attack etc. I loved reading every bit of it but it made me realise how far I have yet to experience and learn in my career.
Anyway, they did have some smaller points that I could use in my game. Such as not allowing the player to attack towards the camera as this can be jarring. I allowed it from the start since originally my player character did not strafe but ran in the direction the player faced and it never really changed since even when the movement changed. So i followed in their footsteps and removed the abiltity to attack in the moving direction and instead it attacks towards the cameras forward, unless there is an enemy nearby of course. However, they were able to implement features to keep the enemy in the screen such as using positioning and their "Strike assist" feature that moved enemies towards the centre fo the screen when they are hit. Small, simple but very effective. This would be a great idea for me if the player was always attacking in front of them but I have yet to implement this in unity. That will be a stretch goal since it is due in a few weeks. I also have seen other technicques of making combat feel really good but again I do not want to mess with my project now so close to the submission so I will perhaps experiemnt with these things in a duplicate project.
