Monday Dev Update #3

Greetings, As of our ongoing work to rebuild Winterfall by reimplementing, improving or fixing our old mechanics, during the past week, we are updating the Combat build on several points.

This work goes towards the next Combat Build release.

To secure and speed up the release pace, and minimize the occurrence of such delays, you can support us on Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/winterfallgame

Input Timings

This week involved a lot of ground work on rebuilding the combat input to animation timings mechanics. Up until this week, combat attacks would be triggered as of their input being activated and independently of the ensuing animation. While this meant high fidelity as far as getting your feedback from your input, it also meant that most of the time, you'd be left watching an attack animation that had fulfilled its purpose from the very first frame, and so besides looking nice, had no real point. It also hindered the use of dual attack animations, since only the first attack would hit.

This is typically the kind of work you're not so excited to take care of because it's going to take a lot of work and won't offer a lot to show for it, where new mechanics or more flashy things feel more rewarding to finish. However, it's also precisely the kind of stuff that is necessary, because it's what makes the gameplay feel more responsive, immersive and visceral.

So a solid half of the week was spent digging into that task, and offered some nice results already. You can watch a summary here:

Defeat

The other big piece that received significant attention deals with the defeat mechanics. This requires a bit of explanation, for the defeat mechanics in Winterfall are, as are many other system, quite particular and hinge on several concepts.

First, Winterfall doesn't deal with defeat & death as do most games where they're either final (defeat means death), or anecdotical (defeat means try again).

Weariness

In Winterfall, those concepts are based upon another metric, which is called "Weariness".

Weariness is raw experience, acquired from the hardships and overstretches of existence. The main ways to cumulate Weariness are by ignoring a little too long the vital needs of your character. As they go over threshold, Weariness collects on your Character. Other stimuli may also increase Weariness.

Cloudedness

Weariness is an interesting resource to accumulate on your Character because ultimately, it translates into Experience. However, before it gets to that, it also clouds your Character's perspective through a mechanism called Cloudedness.

Cloudedness is a state where the world gets literally foggier and foggier as the Character's turmoil focuses them inwardly, and their fears, burdens and torments shift into perspective, in the form of ghostly and monstruous creatures. The Character will ultimately "shift" into a kind of netherside world, as a curtain of darkness falls over all for a limited time, presenting threatening challenges.

Cloudedness also makes the Character quite vulnerable, as their torments impede their will to carry on. Some Characters may be more equipped than others to deal with such a state, but going through it is always quite an ordeal.

Those are the things we worked on this past week, to be fully finished mechanically next week.

Thank you for your interest!

Original Combat Alpha Build here (does NOT yet contain above updates): https://www.patreon.com/posts/52531521