Happy 2014 news - Bleach: Zanpakutou Senshi mod for Half-Life

Happy New Year

Christmas has been quite busy for most of the developers due to exams in January.With some well placed timing, we found it the time to follow up on the meeting regarding the melee fighting design.
It is still only in the design phase, but we expect to be working on the implementation right after our general meeting in January.

An radical change

The new fighting system will have an impact on the game design. We never released the paper explaining the former system, due to its complexity, which made the design incomplete.
So we decided that we needed to clean the slate and make something that we can actually work with.
Roei deserves the credit for the new idea, the rest of us only ended up poking to some of the details, we agreed that it seems solid.

The major change is to turning the open sword system into a hack 'n' slash system.That means that the idea we had from Star Wars: Jedi Acadamy is now in a galaxy far far away, and this is also what will have the major impact on the game design.Many other things, such as blocking and kido's will remain the same or only have smaller adjustments.

Fighting system overview

Here is a roughly idea of how our system will work. At the moment, everything may be subject to changes.

Attacks:
The fighting system will use a combination of sword- , reiatsu- and kido-attacks.
While kido attacks are what they have always been, reiatsu attacks is a small ranged attack which doesn't take too much reiatsu and neither gives too much damage.
Both sword and reiatsu attack can be charged to deal more damage.
The sword, reiatsu and kido attacks used, will be depending on the character.

Combos:
Combos will be a mix of sword and reiatsu attacks, and may involve movement, ex: dash attack.
At the end of a combo, the attacker will be doing an attack that takes a second to recover from, hence the victim can get a chance to get ready or try to flee.

Blocking / deflecting:
Unchanged:
Blocking only works in front of the character. If you block right before an attack lands, you will be deflecting the attack, pushing the attacker backwards and leaving him open for a counter attack.

Altered:
A charged attack can break a block. After an amount of broken blocks, the defender will be stunned for some time.

New features (optional):(These might not be implemented, but we consider it)
Lock on system: the lock can be toggled on and off and a lock may be lost if the target gets too far away.

Duel: (for all / various game modes)- Players can send a request to their target enemy for a duel. The target can then reply to the request or leave it be. If a duel is accepted, both players will get full hp and reiatsu to battle each other.
Only those in a duel can have impact on each others.
This feature is intended to could work in any game mode, but it might be unwanted for some game modes and hence disabled for those. (could be server setting)

More to come

The general meeting in January will be the kick-off for working with the fighting system, and as we proceed, we will be able to give a better picture of what to come.
The development of the fighting system will be covered in the "Coding Concepts" board on the forum, and larger contents will be written on moddb.

Jobs

We still have at least a position open for Animation and Mapping.
If you code c++ and would be interested to work with the fighting system, then you can send a job application already today.
see more on bzsmod.com/jobs