One last huge tweak

So its been a while, but boy has a lot changed.  After 2 testing sessions on our game (one with the masters students, one with industry pros) we received a lot of feedback.  Throughout it all we heard the same thing from almost everyone:

"Gameplay should be more music based since you are using the guitar."

So that is what we are giving them.  We have redesigned the game such that there is a constant beat that the player must follow.  Twice a second an indication will appear, at which point the player can perform a dash or attack.  Each action will take a certain amount of beats to perform (e.g. the weak attack takes 1 beat, but the heavy takes 4 beats).

A second problem we received a lot of feedback on was the discontinuity between the strum to attack and hold the strum bar to move.  To solve this problem, we have removed the move such that when the player defeats all the enemies they will automatically move to the next area.  In addition we switched our dash so that it goes a set distance, and made it so all the attacks will move the player to the enemy in the direction they attack like in Batman Arkham Asylum.  In fact Batman is a game we want to emulate with our combat, but in a 1d space.  The goal is to create combat that flows with the beat and that will have the player moving back and forth across the screen to dispatch enemies.

The question throughout all of this is what I have been working on.  The answer to that question is the the beat interface and the AI.  Since we are limiting the player to performing actions on the beat that means we need to do the same for our AI.  They now only attack on the beat, and we now have the ability to spawn AI's on the underlying beat of our game.  The last piece of our game we need to design is to give our AI something to do besides clumping around the player.  The clumping that our AI is currently doing doesn't lead to the gameplay we desire, but we haven't come up with something else for them to do that makes sense.  Time is running out, and we are going to do a brainstorm today and pick the best option.

NOTE: whenever I say things happen on a beat, that has nothing to do with the music playing, rather it is a beat that happens at a pacing that we have defined.