Version 4 is out! It contains a number of combat refinements. It also contains a number of fixes and tweaks for things seen in the game play videos people have been doing. I must thank everyone who recorded their playthroughs and gave their commentary, it has been some of the best and clear feedback I have ever gotten. 

There are a few new combat attacks I am considering and the next steps will likely be to upgrade to unity 2019.3 before re-opening the next part of the level.

New Features

Grabbing and vanquishing enemies

• Reworked and expanded the enemy grabbing system to be more integrated with combat
• The enemy must be under 50% hp, small in size to have the chance to gain a red outline and be gradable
• Grabbed enemies will be slain with a quick animation, this will also heal the player for a small amount
• Will grant HP based on your current hp
• Enemy health drops were reduced and this is intended to be a more active way to turn enemies into health when you are low.
• Holding down the interact button when grabbing will throw that enemy to the target you are pointing to and destroy it
• Added new animations for grabbing/throwing

Many attacks have been worked over for timing, flow and animation

• Spin attacks can now be held and charged for a more powerful version
• Light attacks now trigger on button Up to allow for charging
• Spin attacks now have left/right animation variation
• Reworked most every combat animation with timing and connections to better flow from one attack to another
• A number of animations have been touched up

Worm boss reworked

• Reworked a number of parts of this fight to make it more fast paced and active for the player.
• Arena is now smaller
• Boss pattern adjusted to include moving across the ground
• Added waves of enemies when boss goes into stationary mode
• All movement is faster, does not breach as high
• Parts now visibly break off of the boss as it gets shorter

Tweaks

• Added prompts for when trying to pickup health armor or ammo when at maximum
• Updated enemy shatter effect to use a pooling, single particle based solution to prevent inconsistent performance with enemy slaying.
• Added a custom mouse cursor for the game
• Added visual effects to the enemy bite attack
• Added a more visible mouth to spitter enemies and updated their animations
• Adjusted jump power to be a little weaker for the first jump and more even for the double jump
• Ditched the default unity trailer renderer for a better weapon trail that is more crisp and clean
• Touched up animations and timing for light attack chain
• Re-animated heavy attacks and re timed
• Third in heavy chain is now a heavy swipe
• Changed combat rating to damage taken to make it clearer for now
• Added extra gravity to enemies falling to better match the player
• Adjusted enemy spawn locations in the arenas to not appear out of nowhere, enemies will now jump in from the sides or other more logical positions
• Reduced enemy health drops considering the new finisher health gain feature
• Updated animator to more consistently work with the jump+light attack combo
• Dodging movement is now speed dependent and control is given to turn mid roll

Fixes

• Fixed spamming start game button
• Fixed some parts of the GUI not scaling with lower screen resolutions
• Made some adjustments to hard camera limits when pushing into objects
• Fixed some errors with the monster arenas
• Fixed an issue causing inconsistent attack chaining
• Adjusted player Rigidbody to reduce mild jitters with physics steps
• Fixed a number of animator script inefficiencies
• Fixed enemies getting stuck in a spinning animation when jumping up/down from ledges

Known Issues

• Player physics can sometimes cause big launches into the air  in some situations
• Player paws have some animation import issues causing them to slip through the ground in some animations
• The worm boss has issues when the game framerate is low. This will be fixed next patch
• The shattered parts of enemies will sometimes bounce when a new enemy is killed, this is being investigated.
• Performance issues will likely still happen with older graphic cards, try tuning down all graphic options as possible
• It was reported that some people are having loading issues for the demo. I added an invisible button on the Hounds of Valor title that loads the first mission directly, try that if you have issues.