Adam Rhoades

Slash/Stab Penetration and Resistance

This is a timeline of my work on the Stab/Slash Penetration and Resistance system we utilized in our project to make swordplay more immersive. We wanted the player's weapon to really get lodged into the enemies, so that players feel the weight of a hit, and also to slow down the speed of repeated player attacks. Eventually, this work went on to be integrated into slash behavior, upgraded to have pull out rotational freedom, and select different amounts of resistance when pulling based on what direction/angle you are pulling outwards. All of this work was done under close collaboration with design, and our AI department. Finally, you can see this feature active on one of our basic AI agents!

Our main comp inspiration for this feature was Walking Dead, Saints and Sinners, the main difference being that S&S uses authored stab points that it pushes your weapon towards to make the experience super satisfying. This feature could easily be extended more towards S&S style stabs, but we quickly moved on to other features once the stabs reached this state.