Combo Systems?

Hey there

I’ve thought about combat systems lately, especially those of games like Dragonball, Tekken and Street Fighter.

And I don’t mean where you get extra points because you hold up a combo, it’s actual combo attacks where after you’ve done a series of button presses, you can do some more impressive moves.
Something like X, X, O + ▲ making you do some beam attack or something like it. I just wanted to figure out if anyone else have had to do this, and can share experiences or perhaps talk about best practices? Resources?

Help a fellow developer out here to understand and unpack fighting games :slight_smile:

I’m working on a game with combo attacks (Not a fighting game, but combos are combos).

This can get pretty complex depending on how complex your system is, IE: A, B? Or Down+Forward+A, B.

Regardless a pretty important factor in making it feel smooth is input timings. You want the player to be able to press B, During the A attack, and have B come out after.
This way people who type in the combo quickly will see it unfold smoothly.

The way I handled that is by keeping track of a queued action with a timer.

So attack A is in progress and player presses B. It queues up B and starts a timer (if another button is pressed, it’ll replace B with that button and reset the timer). When attack A ends, it sees that B is queued up, and was only pressed 0.5 seconds ago, so it immediately does attack B.
If attack B was pressed 2 seconds ago, then it ignores it.

I’ve got it a bit smoother, when attack A is about 70% done, it’ll start the queued up action for that fast combo speed. However, if the player didn’t input anything, they’re still able to until attack A gets to 80% done, after that point they failed to combo and the attack does it’s full completion animation.

And obviously you’ll be keeping track of the current combo number so you can modify which attacks come out when, and at what button presses.

I mean, this seems to work

Ah, right. That’s one way to do it at least!

I’ll give it a look, thanks! :slight_smile:

http://wiki.unity3d.com/index.php?title=KeyCombo

You have linked to Unity content on an Unreal Engine forum, but I’ll take a look. Thanks :wink: