Feedback to make attacking and killing enemies satisfying

Double posts auto-merge themselves so it's not that big of a deal really

crocodile Where you at? Have anything to add?

Pure Miriam

Big disagree with your brother there. They all sorta have their own unique animations technically. For instance the molded bone in the church demo knee;s down as it dies and falls then turns to golden specs. The falling down is the unique animation.

My issue with it stems more from the golden specs, it's so unspectacular to the point of it feeling very placeholder. Like they just put it in to hold out till they have something better looking and more satisfying. If you are going to repeat an animation with pretty much every enemy it should be something enjoyable to witness. In strider the repeated animation is the body parts flying apart into explosions. It's satisfying and looks cool.

The golden specs and disappearing is TOO plain. If you want a hellish theme there's gotta be a cooler way to showcase that imo. You don't want your animation to seem like a placeholder effect, that's never a good sign. The golden specs make the deaths all seem awkward because they kinda just stop moving then disappear into gold dots.

So either you commit to full on unique animations where you let it play out so:

Molded Bone would kneel down and his body parts fall apart and melt into the ground.

Or potentially improve the current one that happens after all the partial unique animations. 

Clockwork

I agree with this 100%

and honestly to be fair SOTN did this well already. You see the exact thing you're saying in this gif I believe. It feels slow and then snaps in quickly. Feels like Alucard is really SWINGIN' that thing hard.

Well, here comes my disagreement time.

I'm not a pro at this, but i can't see what you guys are seeing regarding attacks and i want to show why.

Clockwork  
i honestly can't see what you explained, both on Bloodstained and on DMC games. I played them and i can't see what you mean by making the attacks "snappy". It may be lack of technical knowledge, but to me, Bloodstained attacks and DMC attacks have the same overall weight and feeling of satisfying hit. Since the first E3 2016 Demo of Bloodstained, i wasn't able to see any problem regarding attacks being delivered. By the way, i didn't saw this criticism around the internet nor in comments too. Angel-Corlux Is the first person i see since the first demo to bring this up to my knowledge.

CastleDan
You can see the same weight if you watch the E3 2017 Demo with the player using the Mace and the Great Sword. You can't compare a light Short Sword that Miriam uses both at E3 2016 Demo and E3 2017 Demo, with that Mace. 

fatihG
The enemies doesn't react when attacked? How so? Not all of them, but quite a lot of them does. At E3 2016 Demo, Buer is taken back when you land a hit at it, Seama flinches, Amy goes backwards. You can even make two Buer collide and that even damages both of them.
At E3 2017 Demo, almost all enemies react when attacked. Gieremund almost takes a back flip when hit, Okyupete flinches, Ape jumps backwards, Morte Bone stops and it's body silighly arcs back, Light Elemental changes direction...
Few enemies doesn't react. Even Bloodless, if i'm not mistaken, if attacked repeatedly non-stop, moans and flinches a bit before regaining composure. 

Really, i'm sorry, because it may be lack of knowledge or perception from my end, but i wasn't able to see a single problem on how Miriam is delivering her attacks since the first demo back in 2016.

What if every enemy squeaks when you attack them, and when they die, they die in a puff of confetti... Oh and this is only if you wear a full clown costume including accessories... it would be cool if there were secrets like that... things that can change death animations.

Note: Actually I really hate clowns... I am not scared of them, but I don't like them in general... (and no, I did not watch IT)

lol in the first two sentences of Clockwork's post, I was already thinking "he's going to bring up DMC". I'm glad Dan brought up SotN's example, because that's what I was picturing during reading that post. Specifically though, how Alucard's standard swords animate compared to the Miriam example. Think about what you see and hear step by step (and I'm only recalling this from memory):

Alucard raises sword, prepares to swing (fast startup)
Attack effects animate with sound effect (medium amount of time)
A trail of where the attack was is visible but no longer active, Alucard is finishing the swing with the sword behind him (longer period of time, but cancelable)

The attack effect was also more bright, prominent and focused horizontally than Miriam's, but that's not as important. Fatihg's gif illustrates this pretty well, they would just need to make sure that the visual effect work on the attack portion is still visible, possibly by leaving the "trail" there after the attack is no longer active as with the Alucard example.

And actually guys, if you watch some of the gameplay with the katana, it already is kinda like this. The startup and recovery is longer, but the attack swing itself is faster. Part of the reason this may even be a thing that we're noticing period is because of all the different weapon types having differing animation speeds for weapon versatility/viability. I would agree though that visually, attacks like we're describing can make for a more satisfying attack.

This is good input. I think it might be pretty technical for translation, though heh. As far as adding enemy reactions, that may be a bit out of reach. Anyway, hopefully Angel-Corlux can see what you all mean. I hope I can help explain it better if not.

fatihG
The firesword animation isn't slowed down to show the fire animation. It's using the same animation as the basic short sword, at the same speed. This is going off of the E3 2017 demo footage.



It's what originally spurred me to make my post, and my original crappy gif was taken from this video (specifically when Miriam attacks the lamp at around 1:17). I have to say you've done a nice job with the side-by-side gifs to help show what I meant (and here I am unable to embed a gif correctly).

Also you bring up some nice examples of other animation techniques. One being "Hit Stop" (the lag/stutter you see when you hit an enemy). The other being the fairly newish jiggle which you point out in the Dragons Dogma and Nioh videos. Funnily enough we have 3 different combinations of these effects in this thread itself. CastleDan shows off the "hit stop" effect in his SOTN gif. You can notice how both Alucard and the enemy freeze for an incredibly short amount of time at the moment of impact. This helps emphasize the impact it self, as well as the hit spark and enemy flash (these effects all start on the exact same frame). Even more so the gif shows something else pretty nice. Notice how on the second swing Alucard doesn't bring the weapon behind his head, like the first swing? This is because the second swing is using the attack recovery time/animation as a substitute for the startup animation, which makes consecutive attacks flow together better. It's a nice effect, it keeps the attack pace up.

Back to the "hit stop" and "jiggle" effects. Dragons Dogma has a combination of both effects in action. You can see both hit stop and the jiggle being employed when they fight the Chimera around 6:50. The Nioh video seems to only have the jiggle effect as I can't see any hit stop in effect at all. But due to the lack of hit stop in Nioh, the combat actually feels/looks much smoother because William and the Oni aren't stuttering on each hit. Honestly in my opinion, the Dragons Dogma clip looks worse out of the 3 examples, but that doesn't mean that both effects can't or shouldn't be used simultaneously. Just in that specific fight with the shortsword, it looks a bit off. Now with the giant two-handed swords of death, both effects feel great in tandem, so maybe it could they both could be used for bigger heavier weapons and singular attacks. Also it's worth baring in mind that Castlevania games didn't really focus on combo strings, like what's shown off in Nioh and Dragons Dogma. So the combination could work quite well. I couldn't say unless I saw it in action within Bloodstained.

Nice one for linking the Vlambeer video. I hadn't seen that before and it was a pretty interesting watch. Though like he says in the video, screen shake would be nice but be careful in not overusing it. I don't think light weapons like the kick, daggers, rapiers, shortswords etc. should generate much screen shake if any. I also agree with your SFX analysis, good audio can really add a lot.

Pure Miriam
It is a hard concept to explain, because it pretty much comes down to feeling. It's even harder to explain over text. I'd say the previously mentioned Vlambeer video does a decent job of showing how small effects can have a big difference on combat, and game feel. Even though not everything would translate fully to Bloodstained due to being different genres of games. My DMC comparison isn't the best either because of again, the games are completely different genres. The way Bloodstained and DMC tackle combat is completely different. A better comparison to try and test would be DMC vs DmC: Devil may cry (the reboot/spin-off). I'm not saying DmC is a bad game, or even the worst DMC title; But the game/combat feel is definitely weaker than say DMC 3, and 4. A 2D comparison to look at would be Odin Sphere: Leifthrasir, while it does focus on combos and such you can feel how snappy each hit is, which is what I'm hoping to convey.

When it comes to the criticism of the combat. I've always had it for quite a few games. Though as you can see from my post count I really don't post much, but this thread caught my eye.

purifyweirdshard
I couldn't resist bringing up DMC. It's one of my favourite games that I don't think the combat has been topped to this day. Plus I didn't think a 2D example would've been as good mainly due to how sprites work differently to 3D models. Though CastleDan did post a pretty good gif. However the medium swing speed is due to the hit stop. The "active" portion of Alucards attack is actually incredibly fast. But again it's a really good example of how you don't need a super slow startup, because as you say, Alucards startup is also quite fast.

When it comes to the katana, it does follow my example of a slow startup which gets faster, I just don't think the "active" animation is fast enough. When it comes to versatility/viability, it shouldn't be affected because the animation tweaks wouldn't effect how long the animation is overall, but just how the animation is paced. So the katana will still attack slower than the shortsword, but would look nicer with the tweaks, that's in my opinion anyway.

Though I guess thinking about it, balance would be affected because the active frames would come out slower and have less presence, since they finish faster. But it shouldn't be to hard to account for, or have weapons with an even quicker startup like daggers, or magic. Or have the fire sword leave a more prominent fire trail like you said, which can still deal damage to enemies, even though theoretically Miriam would be recovering from her attack.

I don't think we had this yet (but I could be wrong)... but what about a knock back effect? I would like to see knock backs with smaller enemies or even larger enemies in the correct circumstances... like with hammers, large swords, bombs (or other explosive items type weapons), magic spells with a boom and shards that would knock an enemy back logically.

I love that our Brand Manager is the one who created this topic.

Feedback on ways to increase the sadistic satisfaction gained from killing specific demonic foes? Don't mind if I do!


...If there are to be any Holy-affiliated enemies (aside from the Light Elemental), I'd want to see them writhe & burn in agony in their final seconds after being hit with a fatal DARK-attribute attack.

It'll definitely fit this Achievement I thought up.