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[Sergarr]

What alternative to wild swing combat in a 2d platformer type game like starbound is even possible?

You ever played beat-em ups?

[Scripten]

Does anyone read the blog posts? There was a fairly in-depth write-up some months ago talking about changing the way weapons are used to make combat deeper and more interesting. Actually, many of the gameplay complaints I keep running into (Not necessarily here) stem from people just not reading the blog at all and acting as if the current game state is a final version.

[Darkmere]

As yet the blog changes haven't actually materialized. If anything had ever come from what they showed us these past few months the entire situation would be different. Most people don't "demand a finished game right now," they demand some actual tangible progress to show their money actually funded something. This is the point CF has continually failed to grasp... people just want to see one thing actually rolled out in completion in a test-able state in some reasonable time frame. Daily piddly fixes or graphics changes is a bad idea... waiting for most of a year to push out some nebulous thing wot will change everything is also a bad idea. Set goals, accomplish them, move on.

The worst part is the nightlies show how bad this problem truly is... there's a half-dozen skeletal frameworks of stuff that just barely got a preliminary coding swipe and were left there on the vine to work on another something... which then got abandoned, and the process repeats.

[coolio678]

What alternative to wild swing combat in a 2d platformer type game like starbound is even possible?

King Arthur's Gold immediately springs to mind

[Frumple]

We have literally decades of 2d platforming combat of ridiculously varied sorts. I'd personally love to see a decent beat-em'-up system implemented a sandboxy game -- closest I've personally seen is metroidvania stuff ala Valdis Story or Guacamelee, maybe ol' Dungeon Fighter Online. Or some sort of delicious implementation of a physics-base system ala Umihara Kawase.

Just because what we've had in the terraria-like line has been fairly uninspired doesn't mean that is what must exist, et al. There's a loooooooot of room left for experimentation in the 2d sandbox world.

[Reudh]

What alternative to wild swing combat in a 2d platformer type game like starbound is even possible?

King Arthur's Gold immediately springs to mind

amusingly, KAG predates Terraria by a coupla months. And yeah, the release version is way more polished than the one most people remember.

[MaximumZero]

What alternative to wild swing combat in a 2d platformer type game like starbound is even possible?

Double Dragon Neon.

[Sirus]

What alternative to wild swing combat in a 2d platformer type game like starbound is even possible?

Double Dragon Neon.

Combine a brawling system like that with ragdoll physics for extra fun.

[alexandertnt]

Thats starting to get a little feature creepy

[Nighthawk]

Thats starting to get a little feature creepy

Naw, ragdoll physics are always fun because they make defeating your enemies more amusing and thus more satisfying. Terraria had a way of doing that, too, by making enemies explode into chunks when they died.

Startbound needs some more pizzazz for its enemy deaths. Right now it's just... poof. Lame.

[ollobrains]

Thats starting to get a little feature creepy

Naw, ragdoll physics are always fun because they make defeating your enemies more amusing and thus more satisfying. Terraria had a way of doing that, too, by making enemies explode into chunks when they died.

Startbound needs some more pizzazz for its enemy deaths. Right now it's just... poof. Lame.

genetic components dropping

[Skyrunner]

We have literally decades of 2d platforming combat of ridiculously varied sorts. I'd personally love to see a decent beat-em'-up system implemented a sandboxy game -- closest I've personally seen is metroidvania stuff ala Valdis Story or Guacamelee, maybe ol' Dungeon Fighter Online. Or some sort of delicious implementation of a physics-base system ala Umihara Kawase.

Just because what we've had in the terraria-like line has been fairly uninspired doesn't mean that is what must exist, et al. There's a loooooooot of room left for experimentation in the 2d sandbox world.

Egads, I loved DFO's combat. I stalked the Fair Arena for so long until they removed it because nobody bought their items.

[TempAcc]

Yea combat is bare bones atm, even with the recent change in parrying and counterstrikes, its still pretty much just swing swing poof. Non boss enemies are very unthreatening and even then some bosses just seem to move really fast and do lots of damage and not much else.

[Solifuge]

What alternative to wild swing combat in a 2d platformer type game like starbound is even possible?

Apart from the other suggestions, we could hop into the Wayback Machine, and take a look at how the 1989 Prince of Persia handled a deadly and reflex-intensive fencing-style combat system, despite their technical limitations, serious frames-per-second limits, and lack of game design precedent to pull from.

They created a simple, fast, and surprisingly deep 2-button combat system, with an Attack and a Parry button, and basic forward and back-stepping mechanics, designed to simulate the movements and techniques of fencing in a simplified form. The attack animation has a tiny warm-up; if you hit an enemy while they were preparing to attack, their strike would be interrupted and they'd recoil a bit, preventing you from being hit. The warm-up time on Attack also gives the defender a cue to quickly Parry; if the enemy is Parrying while you attack, your attack is deflected, and you have a short recoil time during which the defender can quickly follow up with a free hit. Parrying has no warm-up time, but instead leaves you vulnerable and unable to act for a tiny bit afterward, meaning you can't spam Parry without the enemy timing an attack to come in during the cooldown after your Parry ends.

We see a few straightforward fights at the 13:53 mark. Though it's tough to see how challenging it is when you're watching experienced players instead of playing it yourself, you can see the mechanics in action. When the swords tip up, that's a parry. Successful attacks make a Thwap sound, and Clanks mean an attack was successfully parried. At 15:56, we see the Fat Guard; they parry almost perfectly, so the only way to hit them is to parry their strikes, and quickly counter-attack, which takes serious skill and reflexes.

Full Playthrough: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xv20j8ChtRY

In short, you could create a system that emphasized timing, positioning, and reflexes, by creating a front-loaded delay on attacks and a back-loaded delay on defense (preventing you from holding it down), and a recoil time when successfully hit or blocked against. Looking over the dev blog, they're planning to implement something like that already, but we'll see how they adapt the idea for non-linear attack angles, ranged combat, and relatively more quick, jumpy characters.

[WillowLuman]

I always found fighting with hammers fun in Starbound, because you have to align the swing with the enemy.