Changelog

• Dealing damage to enemies now causes pieces of their armor, limbs, bones, and skulls to fly off
• Added effects of spraying particles from impacts.
• Enemy deaths are now accompanied by a special “head explosion” effect
• Improved hit animation and camera work
• Orbs dropped after killing enemies now heal less

Work description

We received a lot of helpful feedback after releasing the demo on Steam. You praised the core idea, nice handling and movement, but criticized the fights. Most agreed that blows didn't feel impactful, there's no pleasant positive feedback and, in general, everyone wanted the fights to be more fun and challenging.

And first of all, we decided to significantly boost the feel of your hits, as this greatly affects the gameplay and improves it.

We set a goal:

“Beating opponents should be fun and pleasant in any situation”

With this goal in mind, we began work on the “Pleasant Punch” update

https://imgur.com/gallery/fDq7k4O

Improved hit mechanics

The attacks felt unresponsive, you had to hit the timing of the punch animation. You had to click at the moment of the last punch's completion, and because of this, there were often pauses between blows, and sometimes the blow did not occur at all due to the fact that it was easy to click at the wrong moment.

Also, it was easy to miss. Visually, the punch moved towards the enemy and should have hit, but it missed. This was due to the fact that the hit registration area was not large enough.

We fixed both issues. We added buffering for punch key presses. Now you can click without waiting for the completion of the previous attack and the punch will still succeed. We have expanded the hit registration area, now it is much easier and more pleasant to hit enemies.

No health bars

We don't want to load the screen with an unnecessary interface that could distract the player from the process. We want the game to look as clear and friendly as possible.

For this reason, we decided not to display health with classic HP bars, but to show health on the opponents themselves with the help of detachable pieces of armor, limbs and of course heads! After all, blowing heads off is fun!

https://imgur.com/gallery/1TP7c6W

Small particles and head explosion

Previously, it was hard to understand whether the player killed an enemy or he just fell from a push. Heads of all enemies now fly off on death and trigger a special effect.

We added small particles that fly off enemies when you hit them. Bones fly out of skeletons, and stone fragments fly out of golems. This further emphasizes the fact that the player hit the enemy.

Physical response from hits

One of the main ideas of the game is the physicality of everything that happens. For this reason, just using classic animation for showing hits was not suitable for us. Therefore, we added procedural hit feedback animation to further emphasize the physicality and weight of the hits.

https://imgur.com/gallery/t4dtwT9

Camera and hit animation

We have little experience with first-person games. We have never made a camera and animation for such games. We had to turn to help from senior colleagues, namely, we looked at the GDC talk about animations in Destiny 2. We learned a lot of useful things and fixed the animations of hits and camera work. The player's movements turned out to be quite sharp, and the camera movement unobtrusively emphasizes the dynamics.

Here you can see how it all began and how it looks now. I believe that progress is evident and we are moving in the right direction.

https://imgur.com/gallery/k9ualOI

Please post in the comments, what do you think is important in the attacks so that they feel pleasant and the feedback sufficient? What else can be added and what can be improved?

Follow us on Twitter to easily track our progress. Tell your friends about the game, share gifs, this will help us a lot! Thank you!