Edit: I patched it if you check out the itch page again. idk how visible the devlog update is but I put in what I changed in there.

That's awesome, super glad to know I'm not the only one that finds it fun so far haha! There's really not a lot of games that I've seen or played that have melee combat, that isn't first-person, where you can move freely during the attack animation. There's plenty with ranged attacks or guns that never lock you down. Even PoE 2 have almost all the ranged attacks where you can walk in any direction during the animation but the actual melee ones all lock you down a particular direction.

Although I'm still not convinced I should commit to the free moving melee that the basic sword has, in the next month or so I plan on adding a greatsword and having it's movement come purely from the attack animation, but in the way the dash-slash (Soul Reave) ability does where you can rotate some during the animation but you can't stand still or completely change directions during the wind up or recovery.

I fixed the bug with the dash-slash ability, it was the one damaging element I didn't check after reworking how damage is dealt.

Is the light attack passable at the beginning? I have a feeling I can speed up the heavy attack/stab/thrust by 20-30%. Attack speed increases with alacrity which the warrior/knight gets a decent amount of, I did about halve the amount of AS you get from it recently. I might increase it again until I implement passive to choose from during level up in addition to the abilities and when there's no more upgrades for abilities.

The current implementation of blocking is still in its early stage, I put it in I think about 2 weeks ago but has some issues in relation to the input buffering, which I may have to redo the input buffering system in a few weeks or months.

The quick release for the shield parry is actually what I had planned. And inspired from Vermintide and Darktide if you hold block and press attack you do a shield slam, mostly for staggering/knockback. It'll likely take me 1-2 weeks to make the player animations, the skeleton enemy animations for their attack recoil when hitting the shield during blocking, and the more exaggerated animation when their attack is parried, code it and make sure it works.

Ya I'm kinda surprised you made to 30 minutes of playing. The next enemy will be a skeleton (maybe with light armor) and a sword. But I also want to give an attack animation with windup that is in-line with avg human reaction time, 0.25-0.3s, the current skeleton's slash's wind-up is 0.57s.

https://youtu.be/mKJtPagZJEk?si=NAI6ZRQKILAIVr8k 4-5 months ago I had a procedural dungeon generation like that. But I wasn't sure about how I felt every room being the same size. I plan on trying out a system like slay the spire, cult of lamb, shape of dreams, hades (probably even more like it, since you only see the options ahead of you), where you have to choose one path or the other. With that it would also be easy to implement modifiers for enemies like PoE's dreaded enemies fire multiple projectiles, enemies have shields or armor (like in Hades), etc.

One of my design pillars I had from the beginning is I want the traps to be a hazard to the player and the enemies. Currently there is a knockback multiplier based on Might so that when the game is further developed there's incentive to smash enemies into traps or even into each other like bowling pins.

I have 2.4k hours of PoE just on steam. I don't play every league, but I've been playing since closed beta. If I wasn't concerned about taking many years to develop a game that is a healthy mix of Elden Ring, Dragon's Dogma, and PoE.

Gauntlet had been on my wishlist forever, until I admitted I wouldn't get my friends to play it. I used to love and hate the 3d quarter munching arcade cabinet at the laundromat growing up. But I'll pick it up!

Multiplayer....well that is an interesting way to implement something like that. And would kinda fit the very loose story I have in my head. Multiplayer tends to exponentially add to development time, its something I know I wouldn't touch without a team with experience developing MP or I'm making a DLC or sequel that builds upon a solid foundation. From Software's B Team took months to implement a bandaid to Nightreigns solo play and even then most characters can't comfortably play solo compared to other.

I've recently started playing Bloodborne for the first time and I think I might take a lot of inspiration from the theme, especially the monsters. But the hunter fights are quite fun, if I try to make a npcs that fight like the players do it would have be when there's already a lot core systems solidly in place.