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Responsibilities :
- Setup a token system for enemy attacks to ensure only a set number of enemies can attack at once
- Tweaked visual elements such as animation timing & hitstop to achieve satisfying combat without compromising responsiveness
- Wrote a gameplay document outlining the core pillars, player actions, and objectives
- Implemented UI motion for bars, hover states, and skill notifications

____________________________________________________________________________________ Keep Moving Forward

The first pillar of the game’s design is as follows: “the player should always be encouraged to keep moving forward”. I incentivized this is by skewing the risk/reward in the favor of being aggressive.
- Enemy projectiles can be parried by a well-timed attack so rather than dodging their attacks, it makes more sense to dash through them instead.
- Dashing spends a dash charge and only by getting a kill or parry can you regain your dash charge. I figured that if we put the dash on a cooldown after being used, some players might run away and wait out the cooldown timer rather than playing risky.
- Additionally, successful offensive actions can be canceled into other offensive actions (Ex. After attacking an enemy you can cancel the recovery animation by immediately dashing).
- It is also very beneficial to maintain a combo because having a higher multiplier means each kill or parry will earn you more score.
- The combo timer does get shorter the higher your combo gets but the further into the game you get, more enemies will spawn and they move faster. In this way even though it becomes more difficult to survive later on, it actually gets easier to build up a large multiplier.

____________________________________________________________________________________ Game Feel

Very early into development I realized that this game would live or die by its game feel. I knew that I wanted to utilize hitstop to make every attack feel powerful but I quickly realized that this could interfere with our “keep moving forward” design pillars. If hitstop slows the game down too much it will do the opposite of my intent and actually take you out of that flow state. This issue would become especially obvious when reaching later waves with more enemies spawning. We could simply shorten the length of hitstop around the board, but this would make single hits feel less impactful. To account for both cases, I added hitstop scaling so when hitstop occurs immediately after one another, the next instance will be shorter. There is a minimum amount of hitstop that it cannot go below because if it is too short then it defeats the purpose. Hitstop scaling allows single hits to feel impactful while still retaining the feeling of slicing through each individual enemy.

____________________________________________________________________________________ Token System

While working on the project, I was inspired by a GDC talk I had seen by Mihir Sheth called Evolving Combat in 'God of War' for a New Perspective. More specifically the section of the talk that discusses enemy aggressiveness and tokens. In their system, all active enemies are evaluated and given an aggression score based on a few variables such as distance from the player and angle from the camera. Due to the small scope of the project, our system for handling enemy attacks was far simpler. In One In The Sheath, enemies can only attack if they are currently in possession of an attack token. When there are less than the max number of tokens claimed, the system looks for other available enemies to give tokens to. Since enemies only use ranged attacks, we did not need to worry about proximity to the player when handing out tokens. All enemies that are currently visible in camera view are added to a list and picked at random to be given an attack token. After an enemy attacks, they return their token to the pool and are placed on a short cooldown before they can attack again.

If you'd like to read more in-depth, here is my Gameplay Design Document.
Want to see my code samples from the project, they are here : One In The Sheath Code Samples.
Or if you'd like to play the game yourself, here is the Itch.io Page.