As a fighting game, health is an important factor of the gameplay. Due to the dynamic nature of sword wielding, conventional moves with assigned hitpoints are out of the question.
Instead, I am planning to utilise a combination of physics forces and per-limb collision to determine the damage output of an attack.
How it Works
There will be capsule colliders assigned to bones on the character skeleton (view above diagram for rough approximations). When a sword collision is detected by a limb collider, it will get the velocity of the sword on impact, then it will multiply that by the limb’s damage multiplier and detract that from the player’s remaining health. This multiplier differs depending on if the limb is tagged as “critical” or “minor”.
If the health of a character reaches 0, the character will die and the round victor is decided.
Extra Polish
Namco’s Tekken 7 utilises dramatic camera cuts and slow motion under certain circumstances to add extra tension and drama to the fights. These bursts last a second at most to prevent themselves obstructing the tempo of the fight. According to series producer Katsuhiro Harada, it was so that “spectators can experience the same feeling at the same time as those playing, and feel the excitement.” (Sheffield, B. 2017. Gamasutra)
If provided with enough time, I would like to implement a similar system: Killing blows and extremely powerful strikes would be accented by a dramatic zoom to the impact along with some camera shake and intense use of post processing effects such as depth of field and chromatic aberration to add that little extra bit of intensity.
Robert J Harper 