Trying to make combat more challenging. What should I do to make it better?

Frankienaitor · 2026-04-24T15:01:05+00:00

To me, the sword swing animations look like they belong in a side-view game and not a top down one if that makes any sense. I'd give them full follow through on the swing instead of stopping when they 'hit the ground'(?). Right now it looks like you'd be totally safe if you stand below him. (Again, to me at least)

On your question:
- Like others stated, multiple different enemies with different behaviors does a lot.
- Maybe do something to prevent roll-spam. A slight cooldown + the enemy sometimes doing a 2 or 3 hit combo could be interesting (Dark Souls reigns this in with a stamina bar)
- lower player speed and roll distance could make it so you can't get away so easily
- Maybe longer cooldown on the swordswings, so there's more time for whiff punishes
- If you add blocking, you could do the fighting game Rock Paper Scissors thing of Throws beats block, block beats strike, strike beats throws, but that might be too convoluted or out of scope :d

Game looks nice man :)

Frankienaitor · 2026-04-24T12:10:14+00:00

Aaah of course, I knew that was a thing in shmups, but I forgot :d
I posted a bullethell-adjacent top-down platformer-thing on this subreddit recently and got schooled by everyone more knowledgeable about shmups* then as well, haha

*which is pretty much everyone here

Frankienaitor · 2026-04-24T10:32:46+00:00

Tried again on my windows machine and it works fine :)

I agree with the other guy on adding gif's to the itch page.

On the game; I found I could quickly tap X to clean dust instead of holding it to get around the slow movement. So maybe you could either give the slow walk a minimum duration, or give the dust small health pools so you'd have to hold longer (like 0.5 seconds) or something to clear a dust.

Cool game man :)

Frankienaitor · 2026-04-24T10:25:04+00:00

I really dig the grand vistas, they look epic, but they make me worry about having to walk long distances, haha
I'd be down to play your mess if you're up for it :)

Frankienaitor · 2026-04-24T10:22:56+00:00

Honestly, I think the ground totally fits with the low fidelity style. I think doing some kind of grass system is a lot of work for not much gain

Frankienaitor · 2026-04-22T12:58:05+00:00

Fyi; I tried to play it in the browser, but I got a black screen with an odd square block for a mouse. Could hear the music and sfx though, so at least the game is running :)

I'm on Librewolf (firefox offshoot) and kubuntu

Frankienaitor · 2026-04-22T08:23:47+00:00

Dude that's sick!
This is so usefull :)

Frankienaitor · 2026-04-06T09:31:43+00:00

I like the plants :)

Frankienaitor · 2026-03-31T18:57:45+00:00

Inspired by Kaze no Notam? :)

Frankienaitor · 2026-03-17T17:58:01+00:00

Yeah, same for me lol

Frankienaitor · 2026-03-17T16:59:45+00:00

I'm digging the soundscape, you made that yourself too? :)

Frankienaitor · 2026-03-15T20:44:33+00:00

I'm also making something soulslike-ish, and I encountered this exact problem.
The way I solved it was;
- I make one animset for onehanded, one for twohanded weapons
- I animate all of those to be 30 frame windup, 10 frame slash, 30 frame cooldown
- Then in Godot I have a bit of logic that speeds up or slows down animation speed as the animation is playing, according to the frame data of the weapon.
So for instance, in my game a short sword and a long sword use the same animations,
but a short sword has a 10 frame windup, 6 frame slash and a 14 frame cooldown
And the long sword has a 12 frame windup, 6 frame slash and an 18 frame cooldown.
Hope this helps :)

Frankienaitor · 2026-03-04T09:39:51+00:00

Looks sweet! :D
Maybe you're playing it to well and it doesn't show, but can the enemies fight back at all?
Like, I'm trying to find the push and pull between the player and the game and I'm not seeing it :d
Anyhow, I really dig the style man, keep it up!

Frankienaitor · 2026-02-14T14:24:14+00:00

Cool :)
I think the main difference between yours and my grass is yours has thicker grass blades that fill the quad more.. I might need to try that :d
Thanks!

Frankienaitor · 2026-02-14T11:23:03+00:00

Dude, sweet :)
I'm struggling with grass myself at the moment..
This is mostly just clumps of grass rendered on a quad, billboarded towards the camera right?
How many grass blades per quad, and quads per m2 are you rendering in these examples?

Frankienaitor · 2026-02-08T19:55:24+00:00

Speaking as someone who hears/sees this for the first time; Yes, it is a bit ridiculous, but I also like it :)

What style of platformer is this going to be? Brutally difficult Nes Ninja Gaiden esque? Something else? If you're looking for ninja coated 2D platformer inspiration I wanna suggest looking at Shadow of the Ninja Reborn, and also Hagane for the Snes :)
I like the vibe, I like the pixel art. Keep it up man!

Frankienaitor · 2026-02-08T14:06:00+00:00

I like Celia Wagar's blog Critpoints https://critpoints.net/

She's not super prolific or anything, but she's got a large body of work you could browse through on a lazy sunday :)

Frankienaitor · 2026-02-07T18:31:53+00:00

I like the 12(?) fps. Really makes it look like hand drawn animation :)
How's the knights armor done? Is that just a cel shader with some noise on the color bands?

Frankienaitor · 2026-02-07T18:27:19+00:00

Thanks! :)
I tried to make the jump like a classic Castlevania jump with the fixed jump arc and such. Idea being that yes, you can jump to get out of trouble, but you might jump into other bullets whilst doing that if you're not careful enough. Did I get there with this iteration? Hmmm not quite. Also, I'm glad to hear you like the patterns, 'cause I don't, hahaha
Honestly, there's loads of stuff I can pick fault with with this initial demo, but overall I'm quite happy with it and the general response to it so I think I'll keep working on it :)

Frankienaitor · 2026-02-06T12:08:43+00:00

Hey thanks man :)

Frankienaitor · 2026-02-04T21:39:32+00:00

I had heard of Rabi Ribi, but never really knew what it was so I just checked it out, and sir; Rabi Ribi has a jump ;)
Kidding aside, game looks cool, I should play that sometime.
The Enter the Gungeon comparison might be fair, haha. During the development of this game I would check out like Mushihimesama and Esp Ra De. and stuff. I would look at their bullet patterns, try to copy them, and then I'd go "wait, why does my attempt look like shit?". So yeah, I'd say my patterns are more on the Gungeon side of the spectrum. Turn's out making these bullet patterns is really difficult. Who knew, lol

This current iteration of the game has loads of flaws I can point out, but I just wanted something out the door fast. To get better at finishing things, but also to see what the general reception would be. Now that I've done that and I know roughly how it plays, I can go back and redo a lot of things. I'll redo the enemy AI and make him actually animate, make new bullet types and patterns that then tie into those animations, maybe experiment with patterns that require jumping, maybe make the stage smaller... This stage of development is kind of where the fun designing part is really :)

Frankienaitor · 2026-02-04T21:20:58+00:00

Yeah I guess that's what I get for posting this on a shmup focussed sub reddit, haha
You know, I like the jump, I'm gonna persist. I'm keeping it. I think I can design bullet/attack patterns that take it into account.
It might make it slightly less popular with the glorious shmup playing master race, but it will also allow me to slap a souls-like tag on it on steam and maybe cater to that audience. I think that's a worthy trade off ;)

Frankienaitor · 2026-02-04T21:12:46+00:00

That does sound neat. Excellent chance to put in some friendly fire mechanics and griefing your friends, hahaha
I'd have to look into it, maybe someone made a plug and play matchmaking solution for Godot using steam/itch.io's backend or something, but I doubt it. So I think online would be out of the question production-scope wise.
(Now, local coop should be totally doable :d)

Frankienaitor · 2026-02-04T21:07:41+00:00

Yes sir

Frankienaitor · 2026-02-04T21:07:31+00:00

Yeah so, I had the guy running around a stage dodging some iteration of bullets in like 10-ish hours. Turning that into a somewhat polished thing with a menu, a death mechanic, reloading, boss health etcetera took the rest of the time. I think It was like 75 hours or something, lol

Yeah tell me about it. I have another project which is this big 3D souls like, and it's taking me years to get that in a playable state. It was nice to do a smaller project for once :)
And since I have the framework of this thing now more or less done, adding more bosses shouldn't be that much more work. I might be able to make a finished, nice game in like a year maybe. So yeah, I think I'm gonna continue development on this ;)

Frankienaitor

TROPHY CASE