How to make the controller feel more responsive

Reported By: Eldar Bertsel

December 13st, 2023

THE PROBLEM

This final week when I was playtesting the game, I realized that while fighting enemies the player literally can't do anything other than get his because his attack animation is so long that enemy will be able to hit you no matter what. So I decided to go and see how successful games handle such cases. Looks like game use something like recovery cancel or animation cancel. It basically cancels the current action with another action. In my case I needed to make the player be more responsive and have the ability to actually dodge attacks instead of trading hits with enemies.

THE SOLUTION

In order to kill 2 birds with 1 stone I had come up with an idea of giving the player an ability to dodge once the attack animation passes the damage phase(phase where the damage collider on the weapon turns on/off). This will make the controller more responsive and give the player an option to not trade hits in life and death situations. This change alone made the game feel so much better. Now you don't have to sit and wait until that long animation finished playing, instead you can skip it with a dodge and attack again, creating an additional combat diversity.