Devlog 14/6/26 - Fiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight!
Picture this:
The combat system is almost done. The task list is down to about 3 items and 9 bugs. A day should see it completed. The end is sight. But one of those bugs won't die. It should be easy to rectify, but each fix makes things worse. It's simple logic, so why doesn't it work?
Long story short, I'm rebuilding the combat system from scratch.
Now, thats not as bad as it sounds. Most of it works, the problem is that the working part is about 20% of the combat system and the other 80% is failed code, features that were dumb or stuff that didn't work properly. In total there's actually around 3 different combat systems in there. Redoing it is sensible, as shown by the simple fix that wouldn't work. Now the combat system is close to done, it makes sense to use what I've learned to improve how it works, and the old one has so much crap in there it's hard to figure out what works and what doesn't.
Basically, rebuilding it a bit of a time, creating some common functions, streamlining it and making it easier to bugfix. This hasn't gone 100% smoothly, but over the last few days I've got the player side working (minus one Male attack animation). The combo system now works properly, it's possible to do a full combo now where before you were lucky to reach the second attack.
The second big thing is now that combos work right, I could implement Stagger and BlockBreak. When the enemies try to block, you get a short gap to spot it and stop attacking or you get knocked back and staggered. Some stronger attacks also inflict stagger. Similarly, BlockBreak just means a strong attack can hit even when blocking.
Timescales?
The combat system replacement isn't far off complete. Pretty much the only thing left to do is redo the special attack. After that the outstanding combat bugs and a couple of features, 1 animation and its done.
There's 4 audio tasks to do, 4 for climbing and 1 or 2 admin type things and thats this phase ready for testing. My hope is that I can get it into testing by friday. This has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that saturday is when the pre-order for Warhammer 40k 11th edition is ready to collect from the shop. It is just coincidence. Total coincidence.