Is Animation Cancelling Bad Game Design

I was (mostly) wrong about Bloodstained recently

After watching some of the longer-form gameplay video from E3 (not the sizzle trailer they put out to address the visual concerns), I have to correct myself. It wasn't super apparenty in the sizzle trailer, but the Bloodstained devs have done some pretty important work in the meantime to make the game's combat and platforming elements feel much more responsive, addressing several of my complaints. In specific, the addition of the double jump and more options for attack animation cancelling have made the game look far more responsive than before.

One of the major issues I had before was how "floaty" the jump animation was. This is primarily because it lacked a sharp arc, staying at the apex height of the jump for 5 frames. This made Miriam's motion feel a lot more like a balloon than a demon hunter, because humans don't get that kind of hang time. The addition of the double jump allows the player to interrupt the animation and receive a visible response without having to wait for the full jump to complete. This goes a long way to make the jump feel more responsive. They also shortened the length of her jump, making it a much sharper arc. These two adjustments make the jump feel much better.

The second major issue I had was with the combat animations, specifically swinging the weapons. Swinging a weapon was a significant time commitment for the player, especially with the recovery time on each attack. What I saw more of in the E3 demos was ways to cancel those recovery frames by doing other things - jumping, dashing, etc. The added ability to cancel the attack animations during recovery is a huge factor in how responsive the game feels.

That said, I still dislike her idle pose and how long it takes to "eat" a new crystal. The crystal animation takes almost 5 seconds to complete, which is a pretty long time to take control completely away from the player. I could understand using it for something that doesn't occur very often (e.g. a major significant game item obtained), but I think this particular animation has a critical problem with it: because it occurs once for every different enemy type, this makes the event much more front-loaded. When the player is starting out in a new area with new monsters, it's much more likely to get a bunch of these in a row, taking control away from the player for 5 seconds at a time right when she wants to get out there and see what's new. It really hurts the sense of flow, especially for a game like this where feel and responsiveness is so important.

Overall, Bloodstained has improved a lot over the past two years. It's super visible if you [compare the video directly]. It's still got some rough edges, but it looks a lot more fun and playable now than it did when they first showed it. I'm glad I have the opportunity to admit that I was wrong about this recently, I really like metroidvania style games personally and I hope this one does well.

[Join us on Discord]

The FANTa Project is currently on hiatus while I am ~~crunching at work~~ too busy.

[What is the FANTa project?] [Git the FANTa Project]

Got a burning question you want answered?

Short questions: Ask a Game Dev on Twitter
Long questions: Ask a Game Dev on Tumblr
Frequent Questions: The FAQ