Never too early to playtest! This weekend we finished up our first pass on the new combat system, and we had about 8 kind folks in to spend some time swinging their arms, having some fun, and reminding us why motion control combat is hard to get right.
The core of our combat system revolves around 10 distinct but intuitive attack types that can be chained together to increase their power. These are the left/right/up/down/jab attacks which players can perform per arm. Left and right are “standard” attacks – fast for the blade in the right hand, slower for the left-handed power claw. Up, down, and jab each have more specific uses, which again diverge between the weapons, with the claw in general being slower and with greater damage/stun/knockback, and the blade being more quick-hitting and far-reaching.
This graphic shows our rough conceptualization of each of the individual types of attack. "Level 1" indicates that these are the first tier of our 3-tier combo system, with follow-up attacks slightly varying the stats and function of each attack type, ultimately leading to a big finisher.
Actually being able to use these attacks functionally is a couple weeks off, with our new gesture detection system still in its infancy, but we had some extremely promising results with players quickly grokking the different actions they could take and experimenting with flowing them together.