Long swords and Great swords in DarkMaus hit hard, but their slow swings can leave you open for counterattack.  One of the most vulnerable times was right after a quick swing, where your sword is far to the left.  Previously, the only moves available from here were to back off or to try another quick swing, which your opponent will probably see coming and block.

The roundhouse attack can now be done by issuing a strong attack after one quick attack.  Strong attacks like the roundhouse aren’t interrupted by blocking enemies so this is a good way to break their guard.

I’ve been working on some new gameplay events.  Normal enemies have very predictable aggro behavior so you get to control when to engage, but this mixes it up.  Being purposely vague to avoid spoilers =)

My main takeaway from this Alpha, and my biggest challenge with DarkMaus development right now, is how to fix my keyboard controls.  I have the player facing the cursor, with WASD moving relative to the cursor, and the camera with a generally fixed orientation.  When the player is facing up-ish on the screen this works pretty well, you can effortlessly run in any direction (aim + W) or strafe around an enemy (aim + A or D).  Your movement and aiming are independent which is actually more powerful than the gamepad controls even.

However, whenever you are facing down on the screen, the A and D are flipped from the directions on your screen, and it all goes to hell.  I would love to rotate the camera to keep you aligned with the up direction on the screen, but in 2d top-down that is nauseating.  Third person 3d games like the Witcher 2 get away with this because things closer to you in the world don’t move very much when you rotate the camera, so you have something to focus your eyes on.  In 2d top-down, it’s like looking down a vortex.

The primary constraint here is that the keyboard is no good for precise directional movement.  You get a full on or off with 45 degree increments, moving in any other angle requires a very tiring tapping pattern – NE, N, NE, NE N etc.

I looked around at what other top-down games do.  Most of them put the player on a grid and use world space WASD movement.  This was something I wanted to avoid from early on in DarkMaus development.  Creating the world on a grid would have made it much less organic and much more predictable.

Other games like League of Legends abandon separate aiming and movement and simplify everything to clicking where you want to go.  This doesn’t really work for the type of high-intensity combat I’m trying to create in DarkMaus where you need a lot of control over your player’s movement.  It also makes dodging in and out of range very tiresome, as you have to move the mouse rapidly back and forth.

So where to from here?  Ship a gamepad with every copy of the game?  Maybe next time.  I have some ideas of things to try but I’m haven’t found the solution yet.

The Alpha test is well under way, about 50 people have played and quite a few left me feedback.  Lessons learned:

• Don’t leave things in the game you don’t want people to see yet even if you think it’s inaccessible.  I limited the alpha to the first half of the game, but due to a collision glitch players were able to run around and see how the sausage is made, including blocked off areas.  Oops.
• Apparently PrintScreen doesn’t work in fullscreen, you have to roll your own
• Several European languages use a comma instead of period for decimals, and a bunch of convenient C# functions are local culture dependent by default

Thankfully I spent some effort ahead of time making it easy to get error information when there’s a crash, that has helped a ton in fixing issues that only happen remotely.

This last week I’ve been mostly working on wrapping things up for an internal alpha build of DarkMaus.  I’ve been polishing, tweaking difficulty, and doing some boring-but-necessary stuff like an installer and compatibility.

It’s going to be really exciting for me to have people play it and get feedback.  It’s always interesting to hear people’s fresh perspective, since I am too close to it for that.  When I think back to some of the most valuable feedback I’ve gotten, I usually didn’t realize that it was going to make a better game right away.  It took a couple more people saying the same thing for me to try some changes, and then bam!  the improvement was clear.