I have recently started to work on a little Half Life 2 3rd-person-hack-and-slay-mod. The 3rd person camera obviously works, it has some nice scrolling and collision detection with walls and obstacles.
Getting the hack-and-slay part working was more complicated: Apart from the modeling and animation problem (i have never done that), i just couldn’t get the controls to feel “right”. I was trying for a mixture of Gothic-like controls with button-smashing combos of Beat’em Ups. There is a number of attack moves, so called Kata. Each Kata requires a special combination of keys to be pressed while in a combo-recording-mode, so called Kata Mode.
The player would have to push a mouse button (LMB) to enter the Kata Mode, while in that mode, any keyboard input (such as pressing one or more movement keys) would be recorded and once the player releases the mouse button, the Kata that matches the recorded keys would be performed.While it sounded like an cool idea, it soon turned out to be complicated and leads to a very slow and clumsy gameplay, which was no fun at all. So i figured, i had to come up with an better idea.
The camera makes me feel sick (like always). I wonder how this comes. Other games don’t give me such a feeling… maybe you could soften the cameramovement a bit.
A lot of people have experienced “motion sickness” while playing HL2. One of the reasons is supposed to be the FoV, which is 75 degrees - contrary to most other fps games, where it is 90 degrees.