I really hate swords. But I like them a little

Welcome everyone….. to blog….. #3……………………………………
So I have a bit of a comical wishy-washy back-and-forth situation to illustrate, and feature some changes I'm probably not even going to end up including in a finished project! In the original Spin Crypt demo, you have 2 moves: a jump, and a roll (rolling midair gives you some height, making it a dive). I don’t like it very much for designing levels! It functionally makes every single challenge a trivial problem. No matter what obstacle, it’s just jump -> dive. Or maybe roll. Traversing distances is based just solely on how far you can jump (and it’s hard to avoid that with a 2D game like that).

After release, I toyed with a flutter-kick that gave you some extra airtime to think about where to dive, to remedy the final level’s difficulty, but I never ended up publishing that version since I didn’t really want to do anything about the levels. This did add some extra thinking to a challenge, like being able to get some extra time waiting for a platform to move under you, but I still wanted to develop it more. I really don’t like how all or nothing the dive is.
And so, my life fell apart, because I came up with a horrifying movement system that I’m still struggling to make work.
(Note: sword being specifically a sword isn’t required. Could be a rod or something.)
This concept has involved replacing the dive/roll button with a sword button.
There are a lot of conceptual issues I haven’t solved yet, but this current idea was that you had the option to jump -> sword to do a fast midair dash that you could roll out of once it hit the ground, or the option to hold a sword input and release to do a Zelda-esque spin attack, which could get you extra height if used during a jump.
There are already some issues I have with this concept, but I’m not going to explain those til I have the current sword system meshed out. Just keep in mind, this game is not focused on combat. The sword isn’t intended to be used as a weapon, only a tool for movement.
Apparently the only GIF I recorded of the sword before adding a new move is this one here, featuring the slash and a test object to test sword collisions.
I will be calling the jump -> sword move a dive, and the hold sword -> release sword move a spin.

Note: from the previous blog post, I’ve also added a bit. The game screen is now drawn separately from the window, so it’s always hovering over a black expanse (or a background-covered expanse, like in the GIF here). This is for cool stylistic stuff later down the road, but also for fun screenshake effects that don’t involve moving the camera at all, just the game screen (... also like… in the GIF here…).

Pretty early in, I realized the dive didn’t have any oomph. It felt pretty empty, so I tried adding a new move: the airslash. Basically, you can slash once in the air, then perform a dive. The airslash is a weird mutation of the flutterkick/hover from the demo I was testing, where it gives you some extra time in the air to consider where to move, but it also adds to your distance. Using the sword input after an airslash would use the dive move:

It didn’t feel suuuper right just yet, but I stuck with the concept because it was FUN. There was also a running idea that you could use the dive (I used to call it an “air slide”) to bounce off ledges and objects. I really liked this concept, and wanted to really give it my best shot. (Also, I borrowed a lot of temporary sprites from the original demo. Ignore those ^_^)

Then I got busy for a while and stopped, and now I’m back! And I’ve been occasionally tweaking with the movement for a while! It feels pretty fun for me but I learned from the last project that just because I’ve been messing around with a movement system for a month doesn’t mean anyone else could get used to it.

That’s basically what I’ve done!
I have some issues with this system though, and have been going back-and-forth on whether I want to use this system (obviously with some changes) or to just go back to the old one, or do something else. It’s hard!!! No matter what option I choose, I lose something. The appeal of this sword moveset is that it gives you more options for how to move, which can be used interchangeably but each have their own strength. The dive allows for better distance, while the spin allows for more height for jumping over things.
Also I think it might be a little weird for players to be given a sword and not be able to actually use it against enemies?? Like I don't intend it to be useful against enemies. The context is that it's literally just a costume prop, but still. It might feel wrong for people that it can't interact with enemies, so I may end up just translating this movement into something without the sword/weapon.
I also take issue with the whole sword thing sometimes, specifically that potential players may see the sword and decide it’s just like a Zelda game and decide to play it based on that… IT’S NOT GOING TO PLAY LIKE ZELDA!!! IT’S ONLY SORT OF GOING TO PLAY LIKE ZELDA!!! I think it may turn people away. I’ve toyed with replacing the sword with a different “weapon”, like a cool wand or something, but then all the cool sword-pokey ideas I’ve had go away!!

Like oh my god it’d be so cute and it would rattle/jingle around with each shake.. BUT IT COULDN’T POKE ANYTHING. SO WHAT’S EVEN THE POINT?

I feel like the actual solution here is to just, like, actually start making some test levels and see how it feels to play in them? Like ultimately if all I want to do is just go back to the basic dive, I can do that! But for now I think I’m just going to focus on adding some basic mechanics, and see how some friends respond to playing with them. I want to add the basic stuff that the original project had, plus some new mechanics, mostly just stuff that can focus on movement. Stuff like enemies and spikes and stuff isn’t really necessary yet. Kind of at a loss right now, I’m a bit burnt out on dev, but that’s the general idea. I would looove to do a silly chain you can swing off.
There's about a 50% chance I just go back to just the dive after all of this, but it'll all be worth it.. for.. some reason.

Writing this post has been a very weird experience, because it kind of makes me feel a bit like a hack. The stuff I’m doing is not very good! Like this is something that any other developer wouldn’t be going through, it’s a frustrating feeling. I’ve been struggling a lot with confidence recently, and that’s mostly taken form with my drawn art, but it’s really wild realizing “hey, wait, I think that’s also affecting my gamedev!” Writing this post makes me feel like I’m publicly hyping myself up like I’m some genius or something, but I need anyone reading this to pleaaaaase keep in mind I literally have no idea what I’m doing 95% of the time. I’m enjoying getting all this stuff down, but it’s mostly just for the fun of it. It’s like an art project for me! I don’t think there’s anything very important to be learned from anything I post about here, it’s just a lot less stressful to share development updates here rather than post a single GIF onto Twitter and desperately watch the metrics. Knowing even a few people are reading these posts is really nice :)

Thank you for reading this month’s entry! Apparently I’m gonna be doing monthly entries??? I have other stuff going on so I don’t get to go any faster than that.