WIP: Astral Chain Perfect Dodge 1
After binging Neir and thoroughly enjoying it, stumbling onto Astral Chain was like falling into a pit of gold. I love this game. The dodging, the reactive free flow combat, and the entire concept of the chain being my favorite part of it all. It all blends so well together. This project has me trying to emulate and then switch up the perfect dodge mechanic portion of that game!
To start this project, I’m using Unreal. I’ve used Unity pretty much my entire game design life, and I want to branch away from it. Blueprints, the C++, the open source nature of Unreal, make unreal feel extremely powerful- I want to learn more and get better with it. No better way to do that than to immerse yourself in it and start solving problems with the given tools.
As this was the first day, I wanted to get assets, animations and a basic movement controller going. The movement controller would get added to as things progressed down the line, but for now, I just wanted to be able to move a TPosed character. I used floating pawn movement and a pawn class to get started (I could add components as I saw fit), and got my inputs working. I also collected assets that I would use for the animation side of things tomorrow. I’ve got collisions working as well.
Today I also brainstormed quite a bit as to what I actually wanted to do! I took many looks at the perfect dodge on astral chain, analysed timing (I didn’t do this with my warp strike and I think I really missed the mark with that project because of it), and then I actually portioned my project up into bite sized bits. This project is super polish heavy (and I don’t mean the language), I wanted to make sure I planned my time right.
I decided to do it in these sections:
- Get the movement working
- Stitch the animations in with the movements
- Get the dodge working
- Get the attack combo working
- Make sure the perfect dodge/casting system works at least animation wise
- Get the enemy AI working
- Get the targeting system working
- Get the perfect dodge working
- Get the casting working
- Final touches and polish work
I have ideas for each one of these things but more on that as they finish!
-Kshaya