A glimpse of combat in 《Drifting》

Itch.IO - Mech Attack
IndieDB - Mech Attack
UE4 Forum - Mech Attack

Mech Attack

If you've followed my last week's update, you might be familiar with this big fella - a gigantic mech I've designed to fill in the void of my level and spice up the overall gameplay experience. 

Although the mech's AI and various supplemental functions weren't particularly hard to implement, it took me quite some time to make it into its current form. During the development process, more than half of the time was spent on balancing each of its attacks to give players a reasonable challenge. 

(if I delay my second dodge, I should be able to avoid the third laser attack /_\)

There are many factors in-play when people consider a game mechanic is a reasonable challenge, one of them I found most critical is the possibility to avoid all damage provided the player is skillful enough with the game, which is to say, all the attacks need to provide a signal and a reasonable delay after the signal for players to react. I've spent almost a week to tweak the attack behavior of this mech and didn't achieve this goal I was after; since players have different speed on walls versus on ground, depending on players' movement speed, the same attack can either come too quick and felt like the AI is cheating or too late and pose no threat to players. 

I've yet to come up with a solution regarding this problem - feel free to share your thoughts on this matter! Hopefully, I could get rid of this problem next week. Q_Q

Have a lovely weekend~ (´▽`)ﾉ