There's got to be a better way to dodge than bodily throwing yourself into a roll. You can only imagine how badly that hurts your shoulders.

This week, we got to work revamping the combat system. From the start, we wanted to keep the feeling that the player was getting dog-piled by a crowd of enemies, ones who were weak on their own but managed to make a decent threat to the player when working together. In earlier stages of development, we set up a countdown while the enemies surrounded you that would damage you as it hit zero. The countdown did what we wanted, it gave the player a anxious urgency and encouraged them to keep  up their pace when fighting enemies. However, we've decided that it needed a bit more oomph!

Automatic damage isn't the most satisfying gameplay, so we've switched things up. While we plan on combining this with an improvement to the enemy AI down the line, we've made it so the enemies actually have an attack to launch at the player, allowing for a chance to dodge it, getting easier as they clear out the swarming mob around them.  We're hoping this allows for more dynamic and skillful gameplay as different player forms react to getting hit differently, one is quicker and would make dodging easier, another takes less damage from hits.  Continuing onto this, we allowed the player to attack in a full 360 circle around themselves instead of the four cardinal directions and are currently working on giving them a second attack that's specific to each form.