Resonant Blade Devlog 30 Juicing Up The Combat

Hey, everyone! So, I’ve been doing some more fine tuning with the combat. I added in some more juice. Hitting enemies is now much more satisfying especially with these larger slice effect animations. I made a few of these slice effects and randomized the flip around the x and/or y axis to add variation.

These robot enemies show some emotion with some animations that playback when when taking damage. When defeating an enemy, they’ll flash white for half a second, before exploding. The explosions have been revamped from particles to sprites, too.

The blood effects are a little less wild now. The old particle system blood used to fly really far before. I simplified it from particles with physics to smaller sprites of blood pools that show up underneath the victim when they are damaged.

Player attacks now have added momentum to them. Along with that, I had to make sure enemies get knockbacked enough so that you have enough room to keep wailing on them without running into them. I added in the same attack momentum to the enemy swordfighters. I also made a cool trail effect behind them when attacking. I can see this being an easy way to make a dash attack for stronger versions of these enemies later in the game, too.

For the scanner, I added in sprite outlines around Atlas and enemies to indicate their resonant frequencies. The old version that showed the color of an enemy was more subtle. The outlines should increase readability on the screen and make it easier for the player to figure out what to do in a combat situation, especially if there are lots of enemies on the screen at the same time.

Instead of writing a custom shader to make the outlines, I used a more hacky way where I generate four duplicates of the sprite and move them up, left, right, and down one pixel. All of this is handled with a custom script that automates the process. Then, just throw on a tiny bit of oscillation to the scale factor to give the outlines some movement, and, we’re good! I’m thinking about making these outlines optional with the use of an equippable mod. So if you have this mod equipped, you can see the outlines and colors, otherwise, you’ll only be able to hear the frequencies (optional hard mode).

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