New combo display

[celes]

Continuing in the series of UX imrovements, I revamped the combo display to get over two common points of confusion. But first, some context

Iris blade has a musou-inspired weapon combo system. This means, in practice, you're gonna be quickly mashing the weak attack button and using the strong attack button to end your combo with a finisher. Some combos will be more nuanced than that, but those will be the exception, not the rule.

I added a small widget to visualize the combo system: Showing the buttons you had pressed into the combo so far, like many games do. But after the first tests, I realized the combo system was still confusing. As I was saying, there were two points of confusion:

• At any combo stage, it's hard to tell what next combo buttons are available.
• To counter that, I added a little "combo assist" system so that, if no action for one button is available, it will be as if you had pressed the other button. This worked well for people who didn't care much about the combo mechanic because it kept their combo chain going, but was confusing for players who were trying to figure out the mechanic.

To improve things, I've redone the combo visualization widget: It now shows the next available actions, and has this characteristic animation that lets you know when you pressed a button but the game treated it as another!

combo-display.gif (160.36 KiB) Viewed 31 times