Combat is an aspect that's in nearly every game with humanoid figures ever made. It's one of the most prominent things experienced game devs make look easy, but novices struggle with. So today I decided to make a blog post about the combat abilities in Insect Adventure, and how it got there. Now, I must warn you, this is going to be an extremely long rant, but I think reflecting on these thoughts might inspire other game developers to look at their 2D combat scenarios.

So in the beginning, I wanted it to be a simple game with more emphasis on platforming. Bugsy always had a hammer, and in the beginning he just had a single ground attack, a jumping attack, and when you're spinning in midair, a spinning attack because it looked cool. When I uploaded the game for the first time on itch, somebody gave me the suggestion to add combo attacks to Bugsy's arsenal. Don't remember who it was, but if he read this or even remembered that he said it, he should pat himself on the back. A simple single hammer swing got converted to 3 fluid animations like this:

Soon after this, I began rethinking the enemies as well. Traditionally, enemies in platformers hurt you the moment you touch them, so it made sense for me to copy that design philosophy into Insect Adventure, but as I was building the level editor for the game, I thought it might be a good idea to account for mass enemy spam. If you fought, say 30 spiders at once in an enclosed area, that wouldn't be too fun, so I took away the damage collision from them unless they were in specific frames of a new attack animation. This lead to a massive overhaul of enemies and I had to draw a lot more graphics, and come up with more interesting patterns. This lead to the large green spiders having a rolling attack, the skull monsters having a slow opening and a fast, huge lunge, and so on. I had to turn to more modern action games rather than old school 90s platformers for inspiration and learning how to make things fair for the player, but also make the enemies interesting and engaging.

The original Devil May Cry on the PS2 is still one of my favorite games of all time, and owed a lot of inspiration for the Insect Adventure's combat. Bugsy has a 3 hit combo, but if you pause between the second and third hits, he can do a different attack:

This move is basically the same function as Dante's million stab move from that game. It thrusts you forward and does many small, rapid strikes, which can be useful in clumping groups of enemies together and ends up doing slightly more damage than the 3 hit combo, but at the cost of the setup time and making you more vulnerable during the animation (you can't jump out of it). This was supposed to be Bugsy's attack if you made a long delay between the second and third attacks, and there'd be a short 2 hit animation if you made a short delay, but it got cut. The short delay attack ended up making it harder for the long delay attack to activate, and it was almost never worth using it. Bugsy also has an upward angle attack, which was intended initially to help you break blocks just too high for the hammer's regular arc and to look nice, but got converted into essentially a launcher/juggling attack. It may be broken, at least when fighting singular smaller enemies, but it is somewhat entertaining to literally juggle early-game foes until they die.

While I got my inspiration for the ground based combat from a familiar PS2 classic, the air based combat evolved in a different way due to the game's different needs.  As a 2D platformer, you're going to be spending a lot of time in the air, breaking blocks and fighting flying foes. I kinda had an internal delimna going on. When it was time for combat, I wanted the player to want to stay on the ground where they could dodge roll and use the combo attacks I spent so much time working on. But at the same time, I wanted you to be able to spam aerial attacks for their own utilities. What I came up with is a jump attack with more endlag than a normal hammer attack, but also gives you a little float so you can stay in air and pummel airbourne foes. The float came from the need to hold your position in the air, as control over your position is extremely important for combat based games. At the time of making I wasn't even aware, it was a factor that I just felt was supposed to be right, especially after making airbourne bosses in previous projects.

The spin jump attack received very little overhaul, but the method and dynamics surrounding it has changed a lot. The idea was that if Bugsy was in his spin jump animation, you could do a spinning jump attack in midair as long as you hold the button, and the spin would have a wider range and do more collective damage than the regular jump attack. Initially, performing it was locked behind the Double Jump relic, as you had to double jump to perform a spin jump. Now you can perform a spin jump out of a dash as well as pressing the Jump button in midair, not dissimilar to Metroid, and immediately go to town on airbourne enemies. Suddenly, it became a powerful move for more advanced players to use right out of the gate, and a move that is carried by your momentum. It was more advantageous to run fast to set up a spin jump attack at a moment's notice and rip through enemies as you hurdle to whatever Point B you're treading towards. The spin jump attack also lets you hover, but only moving in place as it would otherwise break the game, although I think the move in itself is a little OP.

All of these moves mentioned are abilities you can get as soon as you get the hammer, which is about 30-60 seconds into the game, literally the first thing you pick up. But on top of these are hidden Uppercut and Pogo abilities you can acquire later on. The uppercut stayed mostly the same throughout development, functioning as a replacement to the up angle attack, allowing you to juggle enemies super high and deal tremendous damage to them. It also provides invincibility in the upwards arc of the attack. If you know your sequence breaking, you could return to the intended first boss and kill him in one hit with it!

The pogo is the polar opposite, as it started out as simply a downward angle attack that you had to equip and evolved into what you see in the gif below. It was really lame, and the first change I made was make it so you immediately slammed downward, and any hit that connected would cancel the animation and do 2.5x the normal damage of a regular hammer attack (though all hammer attacks aside from the first ground one have a multiplier). It was slightly more exciting but it still needed work. What it needed, was an entire overhaul. Messing around with code and values a bit more, and making some new ones, I changed the Hammer Drop into a Hammer Pogo, a complete state change into a pogo pose one with unique properties, such as the ability to bounce off spikes. I ended up turning one of the most boring, disappointing abilities into one of my favorite things to do in the whole game.

I don't think any game ends up exactly as it's intended from the outset. Insect Adventure has gone through loads of radical changes, and I'm glad I came up with this way to share my development stories to viewers like you. There's still more I could talk about for damage sources, such as the boomerang and the super bombs, but I think I'll leave it here. There are plenty more subjects I could talk abouton future slow progress weeks, so stay tuned!