Slash! Swing! Thrust!

Hey everyone! 

I’ve recently begun working on creating the player attack animations. Player combat is a big part of Fallen Words and we wanted to make sure our players have lots of options for how they can attack enemies. There are a total of 13 different weapons the player can equip and use, 9 of them being melee weapons and 4 being ranged weapons. For the melee weapons, the player can choose between different types of hammers, lances, and swords. Each weapon also has 3 different attack types: slash, swing, and thrust. Each of these will do a different amount of damage depending on which weapon is being used.

When creating the attack animations I wanted to keep them to as few frames as possible to make them easier to implement due to there being so many different ones. I also wanted it to be easy for the player to tell which type of attack they were using, whether it is slash, swing, or thrust. I eventually decided to color code each attack type. Slashes are green, swings are blue, and thrusts are yellow. I wanted to pick colors that were somewhat neutral so it didn’t seem like one attack type was doing more damage than another since this differs from weapon to weapon.

Currently, the right and left attack animations for the melee weapons are all complete. I am beginning to work on the front and back animations and then I will move onto the walking and idle animations for the player for when they have weapons equipped. Some of the assets need to be redrawn for the front and back animations, so it will take some time to get them done. After that I plan to work on the ranged weapon animations.    

-Maya