This week my main goal was to create a proof for the combo system that we could use in class and for QA. We also wanted to make something that could be iterated on quickly so that adding new elemental attacks would be straightforward and easy. In order to figure out where to start I looked at Bayonetta, one of my favorite spectacle fighters. After playing around in game for a while and thinking about how Platinum did certain things I came up with a system that, from my assumptions, is implemented the same way as theirs. To perform an attack first the player starts their attack animation and is put into an "attacking" state. Then once the animation reaches the beginning of its active frames an animation event is called that tells the game to create a prefab containing the hitbox and particles for the attack itself. Afterwards the player is put into recovery frames and the combo ends when they return to idle. If an attack connects while it is active, the player is instead put into 'hit' frames
which will allow them to do different things based on what attack it was that hit. During the player's active and hit frames they are able to cancel out of their current attack and start another one.
Each attack prefab has their own individual properties and behaviors, so I created a base "PlayerAttack" class that they all will derive from. Afterwards it was just a matter of creating these behaviors and linking them to the players overarching combat class so they could be accessed by the state machine.
The code below is an example of one of the attacks that I made, namely the player's heavy attack combo finisher.
The final result (third attack fired)
I'm happy with this system overall, but there may be some caveats when I try to implement more diverse attack options, such as continuous button hold attacks or attacks that are on a delay. Guess that's a problem for future Cory though ;)
-Cory