Madoc
Project Lead
As it is our efforts would go into generally improving movement and footwork to make it appear more balanced and deliberate. It's important to understand that none of the functionality can be expressed with some if/else statements, there may be 4 base input directions from the player but there's no such thing as a forward step or backward step. The input directions are relative to a facing direction which may not be forward or whatever relative to the character's current pose and during that step the character can turn by large amounts, often determined by physics and inertia as much as inputs. Not even the starting conditions are known. The feet are always moving in unpredictable ways to keep the character in balance and are subject to many conditions. It can't be compared to an IK system where things are given explicit inputs and behave deterministically, any number of things could affect the outcome. It's hard to explain but the actual movement of the feet is the result of interaction by a surprisingly large amount of things and ultimately at the mercy of physics. Achieving the right balance between physics interaction and explicit control is very tricky. We can't even use standard angle based IK because there's some unquantifiable magic that needs to deal with physical forces, the simulation is just too complex and unpredictable to approach the problem deterministically. It's a system built on intuitive approximation and trial and error, very little is actually known in terms of conditions and goals.
Hopefully that makes some sense. I know for a fact that some of the core concepts are quite similar to those used in modern robotics but in practice it's quite different because we're not dealing with robots performing known tasks in the real world. The rules are less specific and also more mutable.
Regardless, I'm not at all convinced that constantly shuffling the feet when striking would make for an improvement. A character just standing there chaining attacks would be constantly shifting their feet which I imagine looking quite silly. In many action games attacks involve some movement (or silly stuff like 360 spins), I can't think of any games where the character is stationary during attack chains where each attack causes the feet to move into new positions. Moving the feet without moving the body (at all) is just not really a thing. Also to consider is how in our game you can cancel an attack any point. I can only imagine something like this working if certain combinations of movements and attacks would result in holding a different stance if only temporarily, which again sounds quite complicated considering how freeform the movement is and how the feet are actually planted on the ground and don't slide.
Hopefully that makes some sense. I know for a fact that some of the core concepts are quite similar to those used in modern robotics but in practice it's quite different because we're not dealing with robots performing known tasks in the real world. The rules are less specific and also more mutable.
Regardless, I'm not at all convinced that constantly shuffling the feet when striking would make for an improvement. A character just standing there chaining attacks would be constantly shifting their feet which I imagine looking quite silly. In many action games attacks involve some movement (or silly stuff like 360 spins), I can't think of any games where the character is stationary during attack chains where each attack causes the feet to move into new positions. Moving the feet without moving the body (at all) is just not really a thing. Also to consider is how in our game you can cancel an attack any point. I can only imagine something like this working if certain combinations of movements and attacks would result in holding a different stance if only temporarily, which again sounds quite complicated considering how freeform the movement is and how the feet are actually planted on the ground and don't slide.