One Button Samurai

How To Play:

Only one button (SPACE)

When the enemy strikes, BLOCK.

When the enemy is open, STRIKE!

Technical Details

• Submission Form Link
• GitHub Link

Lecture Details:

This game is reaction/timing based.  The player must time their attack correctly to defend themselves, then quickly attack again while the enemy's guard is down to defeat them. 

Last term, I made an alternating one button game so this time I wanted to do something different. While brainstorming around a tapping mechanic, I came to the idea of parrying attacks. That idea led to samurai fights and the swiftness of the fight length. 

The entire game is based on two state machines: the player and the computer enemy. I wanted to follow the rule of many scripts doing a little bit each is better than a few scripts doing a lot. With everything being so disconnected though, it is harder to communicate between scripts. So I looked more into event actions and tried to implement them wherever possible. Event actions send out a signal to any functions subscribed to the event regardless of which script they are in. That allowed for a lot of scripts to do their thing without getting tangled up in each other too badly. 

Design Details

Communication

Since this is a timing/reaction based game, the player will be entirely reliant on game feedback to be crisp and accurate. Communicating what state the enemy and player are in at all times is important for the game to feel good. I added some simple animations to show this. Japanese theatre and animation have a focus on hitting specific poses to show who a character is and what they are doing. I wanted to incorporate that into the game as well so the animations are kept at a single frame/drawing that shows off a key pose for the character. The poses are meant to be distinct from one another to highlight the difference between states.