Multi-Player
The most drastic addition to the game is the inclusion of split screen, now both players will have a good view of the action. (It does support multiple controllers, I just didn’t have one on me when recording this gif.)
Ragdolls
Deaths are no longer a case of simply destroying the player when they have no health left. While we do still destroy the player when they have no health left. They now spawn a ragdoll at the place of their death. (Which supports physics collisions with dynamic and static objects.)
Torso Tilt
You may notice in the above gif that the torso now rotates with the arms. Doing this makes combat look a little more natural and also increases the range of the player’s sword movement. This is achieved by the torso inheriting the rotation of the targetParent itself. However, I clamp the maximum torso rotation values so that the player doesn’t end up contorting their back in extreme angles.
Depth Of Field
To enhance the enemy’s visibility from the background, along with adding a cinematic flair to the action. Player cameras now employ a dynamic depth of field system where the focal distance is adjusted depending on the enemy’s distance from the camera.
To keep performance healthy, I use a low kernel size and limit the maximum blur.
Still To Do
Despite everything else of the core game working, swords do not collide with each other. Or rather they do but, the collisions have no influence on the swords position/rotation since that is being tweaked externally with kinematic transforms (rather than physics based).
I also want to figure out how to show health to the player, whether that be a simple bar or a screen overlay that grows more opaque as the character takes damage. Or perhaps a bit of both.
Along with these, there’s still the matter of making the game fun to play.
Robert J Harper 