Yawn.

I don’t know why but today I couldn’t sleep for fifteen minutes without having a nightmare and waking up shortly after. Beside people shooting at me and fleeing from unnamed things I dreamt of demonstrating a game to a small group of 5-6 people in front of a TV screen and with a game pad in my hands.

The point is that it wasn’t too bad :)

It was a simple hack&slash type of game, similar to Diablo. Top down view, full 3D but the camera was fixed. You moved your character around the screen and swing your weapon at the monsters.

The controls were interesting, you didn’t target anything, but just swing your weapon with the “cross” button and hit whatever happened to be in front of you. It worked similarly to Gothic, where you have to time the swing. Actually in this game you could still spam the button and still swing the weapon, but I remember that I was explaining that if you timed the swing in relation to the weapon speed then the damage would improve. The more you tapped the button matching the swing animation left and right the more the damage would match the max damage of the weapon, while spamming the button would do just the basic damage.

I explained to the guys watching that the original idea was to use two buttons, one for the swing left to right, and another for swing right to left, but it was discarded after playtesting because we got bad feedback as it felt too complicated. If then you continued to match perfectly the swing for two-three times then not only you would continue to deal max damage, but also start triggering special animations and chain attacks.

A 2-handed sword was slower, so easier to match the swing and deal max damage, but at the same time the slow swings would made your character vulnerable to attacks, while with faster weapons it was harder to match the swing perfectly and always do max damage, but you were also much less vulnerable. It seemed to work rather well in the dream.

The two really interesting aspects of the controls weren’t about this swing thing, but how the game worked with movement. Basically whenever there was one or more enemies on screen, your character would start to auto-face them. If there was just one enemy you would circle around it, if there were more you would always face the closer. The position was important because attacks from the side or from the back hit for more damage and you could dodge/parry only attacks coming from the front. The other aspect is that these parries with your weapons or shield were done automatically. If you didn’t swing your weapon then your character would automatically try to parry. It worked rather well but the problem was that it was efficient only when fighting one enemy, while getting increasingly weak if you were surrounded by more than one. So in practice it felt like a game where you always tried to circle around the group of enemies, trying to face only one at time and not getting surrounded. By pressing “L1” instead you would break the auto-face thing and would start to “run”.

The triangle button was used to “use” things, climb stuff or even loot stuff on the ground.

The fun part is that the game was playable in a cooperative mode up to three players and had five classes. I remember the fighter, mage and archer, but forgot the other two. The dream ended shortly after but I remember that someone else was playing a mage and I was using my fighter’s body to shield the mage behind me and the mage had this odd attack that made him spam one of the buttons on the pad. Basically you had to spam it for a couple of seconds and the more quickly you spammed it, the more damage you dealt with the spell. Maybe a bit excessive but it was fun because it was an explosion spell and the damage would also match the animation, the monsters were actually exploding and sending pieces all over the screen, the more the spam/damage, the bigger the explosion :)

Hey, it wasn’t too bad.