VR RPG Status Log [7-25-2016] - Stick Acceleration, "Gears", and Objectives

I've got about another month a some change before school starts up again and I have to surrender my ability to sleep, so its prioritizing time. At this point, I'm relatively positive there's no way that this game is getting finished anytime before the end of the end of this year, so the best option I see is to try and take this time to get the single most important element of the game hammered out and ready so that the little free time I do get can be spent on less taxing aspects of development. As the initial 3 goals implied, the top element here is the control system and the different game play opportunities this enables.

At this point, I've successfully roughed out the mechanism for controlling the speed of the player's movement. Movement is somewhat simplistic as horizontal movement turns you and vertical movement still moves you forward or back. The change here is in the speed of movement. Depending on how quickly or slowly you tilt the analogue stick, the maximum speed you will be able to achieve changes. There are 3 different "gears" that the player can enter depending on their input. 1st gear is the slowest and makes the top speed a fast walking speed. 2nd gear is more intermediate and allows the player to jog at a moderate pace. The third gear is the player's top speed and makes them sprint at maximum speed. I'm still debating whether or not I even want to make the 2nd and 3rd gears their own distinct entities, turning them instead into one. This will heavily depend on how the game is balanced later on with regards to the player's available mana pool. Walking is a free action, but running, and sprinting will eat into your mana so using them carelessly isn't advisable. Some tweaking to the exact acceleration that has to be detected of the analogue stick before a shift occurs, as well as how much depth must be achieved before gears are even shift-able are still necessary, but think getting some more hands on them will be important for getting that right.

I'm currently working on setting up the acceleration real quick for the right analogue stick as well as this will be a key factor in the new attacking system. Swipes and slashes will only be registered when the right analogue stick's acceleration is fast enough. It shouldn't take too long to setup, though I've started to contemplate how exactly I want to handle the animations for all of this and how they'll flow into each other. Aside from regular slashes and swipes, guarding is another consideration to make. Honestly, I'm just plain old thinking of removing the free form arm as an element of combat entirely, making having the right trigger held down an auto guard if the analogue stick isn't tilted. Having diagonal arts is another thing running through my head, though most of this will have to be balanced carefully. If I end up having arts in 4 cardinal and 4 inter cardinal directions, that gives me the impression that the player may have a bit too much versatility and may over complicate the controls beyond what they're already at. Again, testing is needed.