Continuing from yesterday’s minimalist Metroidvania, we’re going to dive into the meat and potatoes of the core gameplay: the combat! Since we want to keep the scope small, there needs to be just enough variation to keep things interesting, and no more than that. First we’ll start with the player’s weapons.
Similar to Gather, one of my design goals here is to give the player both a ranged and a melee attack so that they have some short-term tactical options. To properly incentivize switching, though, I’d like to make a couple changes:
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Melee attack is a vertical slash instead of a horizontal strike. This makes it much easier to hit enemies, especially multiple enemies at once, which is sort of the point of melee combat.
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Melee attack should push (small) enemies back on hit. This gives the player just enough crowd control to manage mobile enemies that like to get up in their face, which would otherwise be frustrating to fight in close range. Bosses are generally excluded, naturally.
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Ranged attack should be possible in at least 4 directions. If an enemy is above or below you, there’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to shoot it provided you have sufficient aim. Support for diagonal shots would be ideal, but probably outside scope for the first iteration.
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Crouching should be possible to hit low targets. I think that’s pretty self-explanatory.
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Ranged attack should never permanently run out of ammo. This was one of the annoying things about Gather, conserving the very limited ammunition that was available on top of having to reload every 6 shots. Special, empowered shots might have finite ammo, but for the basic ranged attack, the only limit to its reliability in this game should be having to spend a moment to reload every so often.
This adds some programming complexity, but should make the experience much more responsive and engaging for the player, especially with the addition of vertical shots (a feature sorely lacking from Gather). Tomorrow we’ll discuss enemies, which present a similar design challenge.