Quick duel.
04/29/2016Just a quick duel in Helheim featuring our balcony map.
Posted by: Eluem on 04/29/2016
Category: pre-alpha
Posted by: Eluem on 04/29/2016
Progress Update #5 – Water Mechanics
03/28/2016We’ve finally fully implemented the first iteration of the set of mechanics for how the player will interact with the water on the new cliff map we’re working on. Surprisingly, creating some of the interactions required a lot of rengineering of core systems that were already implemented. So, it also required a TON of refactoring. The main reason for this is the fact that we wanted to create a concept of being “under” the bridge when you fell into the water. At first, this sounds like it’d be some fairly trivial physics or mechanics. However, when you take into account the fact that this game runs with a 2d physics engine, it becomes a lot more complex.
You need to set up tons of layers and complex systems to determine when the player (and other objects) will be interacting with the water or the bridge. After iterating through 2 entirely different systems for implementing this, I found one that I felt would serve us well enough for the types of interactions we would like to support. It’s still an art to actually implement the system into different maps… but I’m pretty happy with what we have now.
Posted by: Eluem on 03/28/2016
Progress Update #4 – Floating Status Bars and Dash Differentiation
02/29/2016Status Bars
We’ve been working very hard to design and implement some nice status bars for a while now. We decided to scrap the HUD style status bars that were shown in the original alpha video. For Helheim, we think floating status bars that follow your player make more sense. You don’t want to glance to the edge of your screen somewhere to find out how much health or mana you currently have. It’s far easier to glance within a couple inches of your character.
So lets breakdown what you’re seeing here. The red and green are pretty straight forward health and stamina. You’ll also notice small and large notches in the healthbar. The small notches represent 10 health each and the large notches represent a health threshold. If you take no damage for a small amount of time, your health will regenerate up to the next threshold. The blue on the left is your mana. You generate mana by landing different attacks (the amount that they generate can vary). The mana is split into 4 “chunks”. All abilities that spend mana cost 1-4 “chunks” of your mana pool. This makes mana management a more straight forward choice and it makes it easier to recognize how many uses of what abilities you can use.
The last thing in this gif is a specialized bar for any ammo based ability. Here, the player with the dual daggers has the Shuriken equipped. They have 3 ammo before needing to reload, so you can see that under their health bar. This space will be used differently depending on how the ability functions. It can be used to represent cooldowns via a bar or abilities that charge up via a bar that fills up over time, for example. If you equip two abilities with such specialized bars, you’ll see a second bar show up under your health.
There’s still a decent bit to flesh out with them. For example, we’d like to prevent them from overlapping by having them push each other out of the way. We also implemented a feature so that when they overlap a player, they fade out a bit.. however we think that this feature needs some tuning as well. Lastly, it we’re considering coloring the borders or health values differently for each local player…
We think that, in the end, this interface will serve players nicely in allowing them to focus on the moment to moment tactical decisions.
Dash Differentiation
In Helheim, your equipped weapon is the core defining factor of your character’s play style. As such, different weapons can have entirely different dashes. Not just in terms of animation, but in terms of functionality as well. They can vary in how long they are, how many i-frames they have, and possibly work completely differently than most like our planned Sword and Shield (having a shield charge instead of a dodge).
On the left, the two dashes are equal in every way except their look. In the build on the right, we’ve significantly altered the physics of the Ultra Greatsword such that it will come to a stop much earlier.
(Side Note: I personally believe that the dashes in both of these gifs have too much distance, but we’re still playing around with this to get an idea of what feels good)
I believe that having the power to control how each weapon’s dash works individually is a great way to balance and further differentiate each weapon. However, in general, they should most likely fit within certain standards unless it really suits the weapon. Like for the Sword and Shield, for example.
Posted by: Eluem on 02/29/2016
Progress Update #3 – Dual Daggers and Concept Art
02/23/2016
Dual Daggers
This past week we got some more mechanics implemented for the Dual Daggers. There’s still more to do as far as polishing, and I’d like to add a few more attacks to finish the weapon up, but this is good for getting an idea of balancing large vs small weapons for now.
In the gif you can see three distinct actions from the Dual Dagger’s move set. First you see a left diagonal slash. The Dual Daggers can do left and right diagonal dashing slashes with the R2 and L2 triggers. This can be used to close in on enemies and reposition yourself while simultaneously attacking. Then you see a simple R1->R1 combo. This combo chain has a few more moves in it, but you only see the first two slashes here.
The last move you see is an evasive cross slash which can be used to deal significant damage in a large area and simultaneously create distance from your opponent. It’s a good move to throw in when you’re running low on stamina after rushing in and dealing a bunch of damage to your opponent.
I think that with these moves implemented, the Dual Daggers are shaping up quite nicely to achieve their goal of being an agile weapon with quick and ferocious engagements with swift disengagements.
Concept Art
So far we haven’t shown any concept art or even really given too much of an idea about the world that the game will take place in. So in this update, I’d like to take some time to address that a little bit.
Death:
When a person’s life comes to an end, they were once greeted by a Valkyrie which would usually either bring you to Asgard or Helheim. However, as the population of humanity grew, and since most humans aren’t worthy of being brought to Asgard, the Valkyries were beginning to become fatigued bringing the many average souls to Helheim.
In response to this Hephestus, hoping to impress Frejya, created a sentient servant to collect the souls of those would would be brought to Helheim so that the Valkyries could focus only on those deemed worthy of being brought to Asgard. This servant would become known to mortals as Death.
Hel:
Helheim, named after it’s overseer, is inhabited mostly by the souls of those mortals whose passions were not strong enough to burn brightly through their transition into the eternity of afterlife.
Entirely complacent with wherever they find themselves, these souls barely bother to drag themselves about unless they are disturbed. The dreary sense of decay and loneliness that fills Hel’s domain has become engraved in her very being.
Posted by: Eluem on 02/23/2016
Progress Update #2
02/16/2016Sorry I haven’t posted anything recently. I was really busy for the last couple of weeks working on learning about how to, and extending Unity3D a bit to help make some things a little easier. I also decided to try to polishing this extension up a bit and attempting to release it through the Unity Asset Store under the name “MultiPivot Tool”. So, hopefully that goes well and can help fund the development of Helheim 😀
Now onto some more fun and exciting updates!
Dual Daggers
We’ve come along quite a bit with the dual daggers, there’s still a lot to be done. We decided that we didn’t like the original starting position for them, with the blade pointed forward. It looked like you were already in the middle of an attack. So we decided to go with an asymmetrical positioning having one blade covering your front as if you’re defending yourself. We thought this gave the daggers a nicer feel. So far we only have the basic attack chain animated and implemented. I’ll do another post detailing the daggers and the design of the daggers a bit more thoroughly once we’ve animated and implemented more of the initial versions of the moves.
Oh and here you can see a comparison between the two dagger positions:
New Map
We’ve started designing a new and much larger map to try out some additional game modes on! Here’s a still shot of the current version of it! There’s still quite a lot of work we need to do to it, but this is a decent rough idea of what we’re planning.
Posted by: Eluem on 02/16/2016
Weekly Goals – January 18, 2016
01/19/2016Daggers
We have a lot more to do to get these working well enough to really start testing them.. and we’re very anxious to test them soon.
Force Field Wall
We didn’t get a chance to begin working on this, but we still really want to try something like this out soon. Just to get an idea of what allowing basic terrain modification will do to the gameplay.
Player HUD
We’re going to be doing some test with new ideas for how we want to represent the player HUD. We’re heavily considering the idea of showing fairly detailed info about the players above them.
This has the advantage of keeping the info close to your eyes, since you’ll be focusing on what’s going on around your player. We need to see how this feels though and make sure it doesn’t get in the way.
Fireball Charge
We still want to get the charge up mechanic in for the fireball to add a bit more depth to this ability.
Posted by: Eluem on 01/19/2016
Progress Update #1
01/19/2016Some of the more technical system changes and additions took far longer than expected, so we didn’t get to finish all of what was planned. Such is the way of development.
Started Daggers
We started the work on implementing the daggers. We’re still trying to figure out exactly how we want the player to hold them so they look properly menacing.
We’re very excited to get these into a decently working order soon!
Working Shuriken
The shuriken throw ability is very fast paced compared to the fireball, and it’s quite fun. We still have to tune though, but we’re very happy about how the ability is turning out so far.
Here, the player throws 3 shuriken and then spends a portion of their mana pool to “reload” and spawn 3 more. The shuriken is the first ability in the game to rely on an ammo system.
Force Blast Projectile Reflection
This is a… blast! 😛 We still want to tune this ability to make it easier to pull off. Right now it requires some extreme baiting/predicting. A bit too much for the payout… but when you do pull it off, it’s really satisfying.
Updated Technical Items
- Mana System
- Ammo System
- Improved poise system
- Damage system refactoring
Posted by: Eluem on 01/19/2016
Weekly Goals – January 11, 2016
01/11/2016New Weapon
We would like to introduce a new weapon to Helheim so that we can get a more well rounded concept of how to test the core game mechanics. So, the next weapon we’d like to test out is a set of dual daggers. It’s on the opposite end of the speed and size spectrum so we think this would be a great way to test the bounds of the game space, especially once we get the daggers pitted up against the massive great sword.
The daggers are going to feel a lot faster in general with a much larger emphasis on forcing the dagger use to pressure the enemy to secure
significant damage. They will also have a much harder time staggering the enemy.
New Abilities
We’d like to add some more abilities to the game to get a feel for how our unqiue loadout customization system will feel. In the current design, the player chooses a weapon and two abilities to make up their loadout. Right now we only have one weapon and two abilities, so there’s no choices to be had. To remedy this, we’re planning on adding the following abilities:
Force Field Wall Ability: This ability will generate a tangible wall in front of the user, at the cost of some mana. This wall will act like any normal low wall, blocking player movement and attacks… and then will disapear after a short period of time.
Shuriken Throw Ability: This will be our first ability to take advantage of our ability specific ammunition system. You’ll start with 3 shuriken and after using all of them, attempting to use it again will spend some mana to generate 3 more.
Spice Up Current Abilities
We feel that the two abilities in Helheim right now, Fireball and Force Pulse are a bit lacking, so we’re making the following changes to help them out:
Fireball: Adding a charge up mechanic to it, allowing the player to fire it at the current speed for the same effect as before, or they can charge it up and release a larger fireball with a more impressive explosion at the cost of additional mana.
Force Pulse: This ability is going to have the additional effect of being able to reflect most projectiles. We’re also going to tweak this ability so that it can be pulled off a bit more easily (most likely by casting faster, but we still need to do some testing).
Technical stuff
- Implement Mana System
- Add an ammo system for abilities (so that individual abilities, such as the shuriken can rely on their own internal ammo)
- Improve poise system (allow actions such as attacks to grant additional poise)
- Refactor some damage system things
Posted by: Eluem on 01/11/2016
Helheim Pre-Alpha Gameplay Trailer
01/10/2016Watch our first pre-alpha gameplay trailer!
Helheim is a top down 2d PvP focused game with deep combat mechanics and a significant emphasis on counter play and balance.
This is our first pre-alpha footage, there is still much to polish and many more features to add. We will be working on additional combat mechanics, customizable loadouts, many more weapons and abilities, maps.
Though this video is just showing of our first basic game mode (1vs1 duels), we plan to develop many more game modes such as 4vs4 ctf, capture point, tdm, ect… We’re also planning to build a new interesting game mode that we haven’t found a name for yet. It will include many objectives and a map that changes as players interact with it and turn on/destroy/disable different objects and obstacles around the map for strategic and tactical advantages.
Posted by: Eluem on 01/10/2016
Thoughts on stamina
12/13/2015One of our major inspirations for the core combat mechanics for this game is Dark Souls. If you’re familiar with any of the Souls games (or Bloodborne for that matter), you already know that they all use a stamina system to create a resource that the player must manage during combat. You spend stamina whenever you take an action such as dodging or attacking. This is a pretty straight forward system and it works quite well to force the player to make decisions throughout a fight. We’d like to bring some of the advantages of this resource system over into our game.
However, one thing I’ve noticed with the PvP in the Souls games (and especially Bloodborne) is that the games tend to make offense far more expensive than defense/evasion. Evasion as a whole is generally easy to pull off in response to seeing another player wind up an attack. This can be so consistently pulled off that, if one player partaking in a duel decides that they’re no longer going to fight back and spend all their effort evading, it can become almost impossible to kill them, especially with some of the larger and slower weapons. This is something we’d definitely like to avoid… it can cause tediously long drawn out fights that end up feeling very frustrating.
Another thing we’d like to address with our stamina system is how well it’s tuned to allow players to really take advantage of poor stamina managerment (allowing you to pressure your opponent when they waste stamina), while not allowing you to utterly dominate them for making any mistakes with how they spend it.
We’re trying out a few different things to see if we can address these scenarios and really refine the sense of tactical tug of war that this a stamina system can provide.
Generally smaller stamina pool:
Most attacks or actions will take a quite a significant portion of your stamina. There won’t be any significant attacks or actions that can be easily spammed with out spending a significant portion of your stamina.
Relatively fast overall regeneration rate:
If you can back away from your opponent for a second, you should be able to get most of your stamina back fairly quickly. This will force you to back out sometimes to allow yourself to recouperate between bouts (and gives players time to think), but it won’t take so long that you feel the need to constantly delay. We want to keep you engaged with your opponent as much as possible.
Short time before stamina begins to regenerate:
Even with 1% stamina, you can still execute any action. So, if we allow you to regenerate back to 1% quickly after running out, this allows you to keep fighting back to some degree even when your opponent is on top of you pressuring you. This means that even when you’ve made a mistake, your opponent doesn’t get absolute free reign to unleash a torrent of damage upon you. There’s still counterplay and reading to be had.
Certain actions can cause stamina regeneration to take much longer to begin:
We’re currently experimenting with having certian actions (specifically dodging while you have less stamina than the dodge costs) that will make your stamina have a longer delay before regenerating. The purpose of this is to make it far more difficult to continually dodge away from your opponent. If you decide to dodge away from your opponent while low on stamina, you better make it count. You won’t be able to keep spamming it again and again to easily recover from your mistakes.
(we’re also toying with the idea of making dodging delay your stamina regeneration EVERY time you use it, not just when you over use it. This will most likely make the stamina delay feel more consistent, and it allows us to reduce the base cost of dodging while retaining the tactical depth gained by trying to nerf it)
Map Design:
This is a very important point. With well designed maps, it will be a lot more difficult for a player to continually run/dodge away from the fight with out cornering themselves.
Posted by: Eluem on 12/13/2015