Hi everyone!
Felix here and I’m happy to be back with another blog about game design in Lost Legions! This time I’m going to touch on combat design, a part of the game I’ve been wanting to get my hands on since we started working on the game.
We’ve been using an out of the box solution for the combat system so far and it’s clear to everyone who plays it or that sees any of our trailers that it just doesn’t feel right. It doesn’t feel Roman either.
But why is that? How do you make combat feel more Roman, whatever that means?
In order to answer the first question, we’ve spent a lot of time watching gameplay videos of games where melee combat feels great - or at least much better - and comparing it with what we’re doing. We’ve looked at For Honor, Elden Ring, God of War Ragnarok, New World and of course Ryse to name a few. In addition we’ve spent a lot of time watching other game designer explain their craft, such as in this great example from Game Maker’s Toolkit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8X4fx-YncqA
The second question was much more complex. What does it take to make combat feel Roman? There’s a ton of amazing content online that shows how we think that Romans fought back then given their equipment:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnoiTX0xZ0Y
I love how we’re able to recreate this today to a point where that’s very probably how the equipment was used. But that won’t make for fun or impactful gameplay. There is a reason why movie and game fights are completely over exaggerated. When you’re not in the actual shoes of people in a real fight to the death, it can look like a lot of boring testing followed by sudden death. So we’ll have to approach this differently. There might be something to do on the side of formation combat and I’ve been watching a lot of content in that direction as well. But how to translate that to something usable at our scale of combat (dozens instead of thousands of people) is something we’ll tackle after the second to second combat feels good.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GKLsHwCXx0&t
So how are we going to improve how the combat feels? Through many small interlocking systems that modern games feature and that make it all feel how it should together. I’m going to share a lot of internal design documents in this blog. Keep in mind that these things are always work in progress and will evolve over time. This is a current design freeze frame for a couple of those interlocking systems:
Snap on attacks
One of the most frustrating things in Lost Legions so far is that it’s super hard to judge how far an attack will reach, which often leads to attacks missing opponents because they stop just a few centimeters from hitting them. Same with the rotation being sometimes just off enough not to hit when doing it all manually. Most games solve this problem through a more or less visible snap on system. When you attack an opponent the system will try to figure out who you want to attack and your character will turn and approach (snap to) the enemy before striking. Here’s an excerpt from the design document showing how a target is chosen:
Since the camera turns independently from the character and you’ll be able to attack enemies anywhere around you and in or outside of your range, we’re going to need a bunch of animations to make it look good, which leads us to our next topic:
Animations
The quality of our animations is something that has been haunting us since the start of this project and Jens has been hard at work improving those. I’m sure he’ll go more into detail about his new snazzy Mocap Suit and the Gladiator School we’re hiring to record our animations later on. I’m more interested in the design part of it all. Here are the design slides for the animation:
This one is all about picking the right animation for the first attack, depending on where the target enemy is standing. You’ll also notice heavy and shield bash attacks that will complement our combat toolbelt and give you and your opponents more options and counters to play with.
While this is all about animation timing and freedom of movement for the players during those animations.
And honestly with these two things the game already looks and plays much better. But now it’s a bit too easy and there isn’t much choice of action. Which brings me to the following points:
Heavy Attacks
Heavy attacks are a staple of melee combat systems and a way for players and AI enemies to take full advantage of the timidity or mistakes of their opponents and also a nice to to force players to either parry or dodge attacks.
Stun Damage + Parry
Shamelessly copied from God of War and to a lesser extent the poise system of Elden Ring (and other Soulsborne games). Will give another way of beating tough enemies and will reward the players with fancy critical or execution moves. As you can see there are also some hints of a health system rework including multiple health bars instead of just 1 for both players and enemies.
Stun + Critical Hits/Executions
The continuation of the stun system, leading to satisfying and visceral short cutscenes and giving the player the option to recover a bit in battle (inspired by Doom).
There is also a whole rework of the armor and health happening and shield bashes have not been completely defined yet (I’m thinking of using them as a faster but less effective way to break a block or maybe as an interrupt for heavy attacks) but that will be a story for another time. Thanks for hanging in with me for this extra large blog but it’s just a super complex topic and I wanted to give you an in depth behind the scene view.
Most of this hasn’t been implemented yet. In fact, almost all of those systems are on my todo this week. Then we’ll still have to make the AI do all of it as well. So we’re in for at least a month or two of work for the systems to be there before we can scale up the content. But with all of the designing done I’m much more confident we’ll get something enjoyable in the game than I was a month ago.
Now it’s back to pixel mines to get this all working!
Cheers,
Felix
