Introducing the swordsman

Well, I’m back on this project now, I couldn’t stay away for long. And wow look at that, the player character has color now! lol

Since I’ve made recent progress on the swordsman's sprites and animations, I may as well dive a little deeper into his mechanics with this development log.

The character I am currently calling the swordsman will hopefully be the first of several playable characters in Anther. He wields a rune-inscribed sword and is moderately armored against the many and varied enemies that prowl the forests surrounding the Cathedral. His strengths lie in agility and speed - weaving his four-directional attacks together, he can dance around his enemies and slice them up before they even touch him.

My goal with the swordsman was to force the player to use movement and positioning to maximize their damage output, and the four-directional attack seems like a great way to do this. He has a 2-hit combo in the horizontal directions, and each directional attack/combo has a short cooldown, making it more efficient to make a sequence of attacks in varying directions. For example, if you start with a horizontal 2-hit combo, you can follow up faster with a jump + downward attack than you could with another horizontal attack. The swordsman also has a dodge roll that gives i-frames, and can be used to reposition to keep the sequence going.

Check out these gameplay gifs to see what I’m talking about. The first one shows a simple repeated horizontal sequence, and the second shows a more complicated attack sequence.

I’ll be back soon with some info on the item system, which you may have caught a glimpse of already with the HUD. I’m hoping to have something that is complete enough to upload as a playable demo soon, but I still have to work out some of the core gameplay features like death/restarts, the main menu, enemy spawns, etc. Stay tuned though, gonna try to upload the next development log soon!

- Clay