Delicious Dev Report #4 - Control Freak

Hey folks, this is Pat at the helm! 0w07

Since I've been wrestling with capturing controller input, let's talk about controls!

getting here was tough, but feels fantastic!

If you didn't already know.. I love fighting games a lot, it's absolutely my favorite genre of video games but something I struggle with is introducing new folks to 'em.'

"You gotta.. do you know how to do a hadouken? Do that like twice."
"Ah it's ok I just button-mash."

This was something I experienced less when it came to Super Smash Bros. When you want to attack down/forward/up/etc, most of the time you can do that by tilting the joystick in that direction. This is part of the learning process with traditional 2D fighters and becoming proficient with a certain character, but for our purposes I'd like to attempt becoming familiar with new characters less sysyphean.

We want players to be able to pick it up and have moves feel intuitive and on-purpose. Affirm that gut feeling of "I want to attack when you're in *this* position" with a matching action.

current configuration for controls

Keeping this in mind, we've bound jumping, grabbing, and blocking to their own buttons.

We're going ham on the food puns here so Normal and Heavy attacks are "Mild" and "Spicy" here. The direction you're pointing the joystick affects which moves come out, so you'll see neutral/up/down/side variations for both types of attacks. 

As you duke it out, you'll build up an Extra Value meter!

just a placeholder bar for now

For now this can be used to escape a beatdown with a Combo Cancel (1/3rd of meter) or a Deluxe Attack (full meter attack!).

Finally, you'll probably notice that we put a taunt button as one of the face buttons. As in any game, taunts do a lot to show off a character's personality but here we're implementing them in a prettttty neat way, which we'll dive into in later devlog.

That's it for today's Delicious Dev Report!

-Pat