So Bad It's Good Jam Day 2

Well the first weekend of the So Bad It's Good game jam is over, and I've made some progress, but not as much as I would've liked.

Combat

I pulled what I learned from previous prototypes together to form the backbone of the combat system for this game. much like in Kingdom Come Deliverance and Mount & Blade, the player can attack or block in multiple directions. The player can slash from above, from their left and from the right, and they can stab if the mouse is moved downward.

In the video above you'll notice that the player blocks don't line up with the directional arrows, this is because I have an added mode where the player can automatically block attacks of the NPC they're currently locked on to. It makes testing the combat easier for hit detection and such, and I might add it as an option in-game. Or, to keep in line with the theme of the jam, I may leave it out, or make it unlockable only through skill progression.

Speaking of the target lock, I actually managed to implement the ability to switch targets with the scroll-wheel, similar to Kingdom Come.

Ideally, the if the player scrolled up it would change to the enemy nearest to the left of the currently targeted NPC, and scrolling down the nearest to the right. But since we're aiming for maximum funny and jank, I think it's fine as is.

Factions

The other big feature I wanted to implement with the AI is an opinion and faction system. Currently there are a few factions:

Loyalists and Federal Legion are hostile towards each other, Bandits and Wilderness (basically any wild animals or monsters) are hostile to anything not of the same faction, and Independent are simply out for themselves. Currently the faction system really only plays into whether certain NPC's attack each other, so it's pretty much either they attack someone on site or they don't. But I made sure to tie it into the opinion system so that it can be expanded upon further in future projects.

As you can see, there are a list of opinion modifier objects that add or subtract from an NPC's current opinion of any other NPC or the player. In the image above, the NPC is part of the Bandits faction, who attack any non-Bandits on sight, so the "Hostile Faction" modifier is added to the list. The player has also attacked this character, so the "Attacked Me" modifier is added as well. Since this NPC is a Bandit, they would be hostile towards us no matter what. But if the NPC was a Loyalist or Independent, they might be alright with us, until we attack them that is. This system is currently pretty hacked together, but it does work atleast in terms of determining whether or not to attack someone else.

Here we can see a group of Bandits fighting a group of Loyalists, it's kinda cool to see them actually run at each other and hack away, but pretty quickly you can see the issues with the combat system. Sometimes the NPC's will be just out of range and will swing at each other but not hit, other times they'll get stuck behind each other and not participate at all.

I do currently love though how if the Loyalists win the fight, since they aren't automatically hostile to the player, they'll just sheath their swords and chill after they kill all the Bandits.

Oh and the enemies ragdoll on death.

Looking Ahead...

Tomorrow, I wanna start work on that questing system I mentioned in the first devlog. I think that even if the combat doesn't work fully, some funny charm can be gained from how broken it is. But if the quests and dialogue don't work then the game won't have anything to grab players with. I think fans of So Bad It's Good games can forgive janky combat as long as they get some interesting or insane dialogue and plot.