Dash n Slash

Inspiration / Core Mechanics

The initial inspiration for this project was a film cliche where a samurai is so fast with their sword that the damage from their sword swings is only seen after they sheath their sword. So I developed that concept into the core game mechanics of dashing to stun large amounts of enemies and then the player sheaths their sword to finish them off. This core gameplay loop led to a focus on a satisfying finish which guided the rest of my design and development.

Enemy AI

The next focus after developing my core mechanics was enemies. Since these enemies come in great numbers and are intended to be disposable, I designed their behavior to be simple. The enemies will walk around randomly in an area until the player comes within a certain range where they will begin chasing the player until they are within attack distance or the enemy is dead. I used a state machine implementation because the scale of the project was small and the enemy behavior was simple, so the poor scaling of state machines won't be a problem.

The most complex behavior I needed to consider was two enemy's single attacks are 3 consecutive attacks. To take into account the animation and functionality of the consecutive attack I reused the functionality of the attack and idle state and kept track of the number of attacks externally.

Polish

After the main mechanics and enemies were developed I continued to polish with particle effects and UI. For the blood effect, I initially attempted a fountain-like flow of blood that was localized to a small area but it felt unnatural and made me realize I needed to experiment. This was a trial-and-error process of trying to find the best feeling effect for the blood so I developed a very simple particle system that allowed me to adjust the velocity, gravity, direction, and amount of blood particles. Then I eventually settled on a burst-like effect to emphasize a single impact of shealthing the sword.