Arena of Might

Cobblestone Grime: Arena of Might

Story
Fight your way through 10 bouts in the Arena of Might. Each fight will pit you against a new type of foe. Between each fight you will be returned to the Locker Room where your patrons will leave you new weapons and armor. The harder the fights you win the better the weapons and armor your patrons will leave you.  Grab the gear you want, train the abilities you want, and then head through the portal to the next fight.

Your first fight is against some large rats found living in your Locker Room before they threw you into it. After that you will fight against monsters and mercenaries until you prove yourself against a fellow gladiator. Marvin the Minotaur. Defeat it and claim it's War Hammer if you so wish.  From then on your opponents will be exceptional.  The last fight is against the reigning champion, The Dark Knight

Instructions

You start in your personal Locker Room where you are safe and can familiarize yourself with the controls.  Look around and you will see a wall with icons. They represent your abilities and you can choose one to upgrade.

To pick the ability to upgrade walk up to it and grab it.

• Agility increases your chance to hit and dodge
• Might significantly increases your damage
• Skill increases your chance to hit and damage
• Health significantly increases your hitpoints

Look around and you will see a wall with items. After each round will be one weapon and two pieces of armor. Grabbing the item will equip it. Once equipped it can't be removed, only replaced with a new item. Armor includes light, medium, and heavy. each tier increases protection without any detriment. Be sure to always pick up your armor between fights. Weapons include dagger, short sword, long sword, club, mace, war hammer, and battle axe.

Use your intuition when choosing a weapon and attack type. For example War Hammers have devastating bashing attacks, but have no stab or slash damage.

Use your intuition when choosing an attack on a creature. The Reaper is made of solid living wood, bashing won't be as effective as slashing and chopping. A Dark Knight in full plate will shrug off slashes.

In the corner of the room is a training dummy. You can practice your attacks against the dummy. It has the "skills" to represent a mid level opponent in the arena.

VR Controls

Motion and actions in VR can be done with gestures.

Walking:
Walking happens in the direction you are looking. Walk in place to advance forward to the next square. (a side to side rocking motion from shifting weight on your feet seems to work best) You can also use the left thumbstick to walk forward by pushing the thumbstick forward. Backward and Strafing Left and Right can also be controlled by the Left-Thumbstick.

Waiting:
Unfortunately I didn't have enough time to add a wait gesture. Please use the controller button (B)

Attacking:
Attacking happens in the direction you are looking.
Bash: Raise you right hand up and bring it down quickly in a straight line in front of you to bash.
Slash: Place you right hand to the left or right of your torso and swing to the opposite side while staying parallel to the ground to slash.
Stab: Rush your right hand forward while staying parallel to you head to stab. (make a stabbing motion in the direction you are looking
Grab: Put right hand forward while looking at the item to grab and make a pulling motion. (reverse stab)

If you are having trouble replicating the motions try practicing in the Locker Room on the Training Dummy.

If you would like to use button inputs those are supported as well:

Walking:
Walking happens in the direction you are looking. You can use the Left-Thumbstick to walk forward by pushing the Left-Thumbstick Forward. Backward and Strafing Reft and Right can also be controlled by the Left-Thumbstick.

Waiting:
Press the secondary button (B) on the right thumbstick.

Attacking:
Attacking happens in the direction you are looking against the enemy with the target reticle on it.
Bash: Push the Right-Thumbstick Backwards.
Slash: Push the Right-Thumbstick Left or Right.
Stab: Push the Right-Thumbstick Forwards.Grab: Push the Primary Button (A) on the Right-Thumbstick.

Keyboard Controls (Defaults)

W Walk forward
S Walk Backward
A Strafe Left
D Strafe Right
Q Turn Left
E Turn Right
X Wait turn
F Grab / Pickup items and skills
J and L Slash attack
I Bash attack
K Stab attack 
Cursor Keys move menus

Game Dev and Jam Notes

This was a lot of fun putting together. The VR aspect is really interesting. Tweaking balance is an ongoing issue and I still don't think I have it down right.  Gestures are very fiddly to deal with.  They work 90% of the time if you know what the gestures are looking for, but that 10% false negative is very annoying. 

There are also some accessibility things I wish I could get in, like a Light/Bright Mode, and Snap Turn in VR.

My 2D Text UI render is done with Canvas2D on the main thread.  In VR a full rerender of a screen will cause frame stutter.  In the future if I continue VR games I will need a more performant GPU rendered Text UI engine.

Features did get cut as I have run out of time.  Some notable missing features:

• VR Wait Gesture (was going to be chest thumping)
• Arena themes (sewers, forest, cave)
• Arena traps
• Cozier Locker Room

Bugfix and Accessibility update:

Keybind screen wasn't listing some keys properly, it now does.
Mouse sensitivity option wasn't displaying properly, it now does.
Added an option to enable mouse invert, mouse invert is now off by default.
Added an option to switch to a Light-Mode color scheme for the text mode ui (this isn't saved between games).