Some other adjustments for 4-way aim.

[Professor Paul1290]

I'm more or less satisfied with the current control setup, though I wanted to put out for discussion a few adjustments I think might help it along.

Now that the game uses 4-way aim, I think it might be beneficial to make the straight projectiles for a lot of the mage classes larger to facilitate jumping and shooting. I remember a lot of games with 4-way aim tended to have pretty large projectiles relative to the size of the character, maybe even half as tall to just as tall.

I also noticed that holding "down" still inhibits jumping high. I think this should be removed since we'll be jumping over enemies and firing down more, and that's a bit tricky the way it is now.

This last one is a bit more drastic and might require some more significant re-balancing, but would it be OK to make the jumping physics a bit more "floaty"?
I'm not saying that the characters should jump higher, but I feel like it would be nice if we got a bit more air time to make jumping and shooting a bit more natural. Maybe have a bit more inertia in general.

Thoughts?

[madcow]

Not a fan of making all attacks the size or half the size of the character. For one thing, that would make it more difficult to shoot over/around obstacles. A few spells designed around using big particles - sure. I'm a big fan in general of having spell choice not just be determined by DPS but because of spell arcs/aiming/firing behavior.

On the topic of floaty jumping. I'm not sure about doing it in general, but a lot of games have it where if you shoot downwards, it will slow your descent - perhaps that could be used here? One example of this would be the machine gun in cave story. I could see this being more important to shoot enemies now that there's no diagonal firing.

[chemical_art]

In my experience, for every shot that i missed due to the environment and my large size of shot, I would have missed at least 30 shots from trying to hit a small enemy directly since it was too small.

[Professor Paul1290]

Not a fan of making all attacks the size or half the size of the character. For one thing, that would make it more difficult to shoot over/around obstacles.

In my experience, for every shot that i missed due to the environment and my large size of shot, I would have missed at least 30 shots from trying to hit a small enemy directly since it was too small.

Hm... yea I guess I kind of forgot about that. Also, I remembered that some shots block other shots so I guess enlarging the projectiles might not help much.

[madcow]

One possibility I just thought of is if there were perks to increase particle size. This might not be particulary doable if it requires making several versions of all the particle effects. Not sure if it's possible (or desirable) to use a sort of stretch function on them.

Personally, I would like to see a caliber perk - it might make sense to combine the two for bigger and better piercing shots. The tradeoff being you miss out on a health or damage perk.

[Professor Paul1290]

I'm not sure about doing it in general, but a lot of games have it where if you shoot downwards, it will slow your descent - perhaps that could be used here? One example of this would be the machine gun in cave story. I could see this being more important to shoot enemies now that there's no diagonal firing.

I actually kind of like this.

Alternatively, while this might sound a bit silly, what if using an attack in general slowed your descent?
I think it would let you get a few more shots in you you jumped to shoot something and it would encourage you to line up before shooting rather than hold down the attack button and jump like crazy.
I could have sworn I've seen this before but I don't remember where.

In any case, unless I'm missing something, I guess it would be agreed that holding down shouldn't keep you from jumping high as this makes shooting down hill very awkward.