New Ability: Throwing Knives

​What if wings could be knives? And what if those knives could be thrown? And instead of you going to pick up the knife like a boring little dude you front flipped quickly as if the knife was pulling you to itself? These are the questions we must ask ourselves in game development...

This was my first attempt at a projectile-based ability. It had to be constructed quite differently because I had to add two wings as static meshes as opposed to having the wings be a part of Juda's skeletal mesh. At any rate, I am extremely happy with it. The movement is super satisfying and fun. This ability will be fairly late game as it negates a lot of other forms of travel and will make early platforming puzzles fairly trivial (although it will add a whole bunch of complexity for future platforming).

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I am closing in on completing all of Juda's abilities that I have planned. Here's what is left:

- cleanup sword and shield animations and redo the backend code (it is a little messy and unreliable)
- add a special spin attack to the dual blades ability
- add a boomerang ability

Once I have all of these abilities done, I am going to start building an environment specifically for a well-polished demo complete with a nice environment, puzzles, and enemies. Then I will be asking for some playtesters to give me feedback on how everything fits together. So look forward to that! My beginning goal was to create a decent demo in sixth months. So far everything I have built in Juda has taken four months (including a lot of basic UI, and backend systems that will make things smooth going forward). I think it will be difficult but possible to get a nice demo done in my original timeline.

​My wife and I are also moving across the country at the end of this month, so that will take a chunk of time away from development as well. Anyway, I am not going to rush anything, but I am anxious to get a working playable thing for people to start giving me better feedback on. We shall see what happens!