About me. I aspire to work as a videogame combat designer, yet I haven't made a single dollar from games.
So please, take my comment as it is.
I'm using the body rig, body meshes and animations from people who do make money from videogames; professionals.
I'm just polishing flow and adding power through thought.
I'm playing a game and by default, their weapons start the basic combo with a cross slash from left to right.
Someone got paid to make that call. Or not?
I think is a mistake, so maybe my thoughts might be worth something to Ashes.
Creating power, flow and aesthetic
As a rule of thumbs, humanoids most basic attacks and combos chains should start from the dominant side.
Specially if it is the basic combo you are going to see everytime all day.
Imagine waking up every day with the wrong foot.
I have aligned key poses with the two attacks so you can have an idea about how it looked, and what I think it's better version should look like.
Explanation and thought process
My building blocks: A bit of martial knowledge, biomechanics, human behavior and aesthetic eye.
1) Human behavior
-The first thing human use are reliable things. The most reliable is to use the most power. High power get generated from our dominant side.
-Historically and objetively most people are right handed.
2) Biomechanics and human behavior
-Starting with arms crossed
feel intuitively wrong (because of
intuitive understanding of biomechanic and how body masses work in a enviroment with gravity, force generation, blah blah blah and so forth)
3) Biomechanics
This chain of attacks doesn't "sell" weight or
power.
4) Aesthetic eye (subjective)
Nor does it contribute to the
aesthetic of the game (The opposite, actually)
I simply changed order of attacks for flow and aesthetics, and made "decending right slash" animation shine more and sell more power.
I genuinely think this are the small things that build combat flow and weight.
I don't have papers to prove it but I don't have doubts neither
It took me 1 second to notice, 2 minute to set all meshes and animations, 20 minutes for writing it down and making it somehow inteligible.
Add combination from right, left and play around all you want but if it is the most basic combo and the one the player is going to see the most, why would you make the first attack a cross slash from the weak side?
TL;DR: I'm making a huge deal that
basic combos should start from the dominant hand side. Not always, but starting strong should be the rule of thumb for combat, in my opinion.
