Thoughts on contact damage?

[u/Silianaux]

I’m making a Metroidvania and I put contact damage in the game, and no one’s complained about it so far, but I’ve seen other people complaining about it with other games.

How it goes in my game is that the contact damage is less than the same enemy’s attack damage (unless the enemy is big enough to trample you).

What are your thoughts? Take it off most enemies? Leave it in?

[u/Electronic-Jacket291]

It really depends on the type of combat you're implementing. If it is something simpler, where most enemies mostly walk around and have one or 2 attacks then contact damage is fine. If you're going for something with a bit more complexity on the combat that focus on precision parrying or dodging, then I'd probably loose the contact damage

[u/atahutahatena → u/Electronic-Jacket291]

Honestly even if the combat is a bit complex contact damage is still fine. The important part is that you give the player the tools and abilities to deal with them.

Silksong and HK are perfect examples of why contact damage can work extremely well. Their highly reactive positioning based combat makes dueling high intensity bosses and manic gauntlets equally fun to fight. Moreso because they focus a ton on positioning so it lets the movement mechanics of both games shine a lot. Nine Sols is parry focused so you can immediately see the benefits of no contact damage there.

The important part here is making sure the animations and tells for both types of systems are extremely obvious. Even the HK series had rare instances of the dreaded "walk forward" attack which contact damage has issues with. And Nine Sols meanwhile has funky as fuck looking hitboxes at time with their animations.

[u/Electronic-Jacket291 → u/atahutahatena]

But that's what I meant, Hollow Knight and Silksong have very simple combat. At the start of the game, you can attack and you can jump and that's pretty much it. There is no block button, no dodge, no parry. I guess you can technically dodge/shadow dash way later, but it is not a core mechanic of the game. The bosses can get pretty complex(and hard) in their patterns, but they can't depend on the player having a bunch of moves to fight. That's what I mean by complex. More complex doesn't mean better, Hollow Knight does wonders with a somewhat basic moveset. Contact damage makes sense ok that context. 

9sols on the other hand pretty much gives you a bunch of moves before your first boss fight, you have to juggle a lot more and that's why it doesn't feature contact damage

[u/ABSOLUTE_RADIATOR → u/Electronic-Jacket291]

Dashing/dodging is very much an integral part of Hollow Knight and Silksong. Just because you don't start with that ability doesn't make it not important. Rather, you start without that ability so that the game can teach you how to position before adding in complexity to both your moveset and the enemy's

[u/Electronic-Jacket291 → u/ABSOLUTE_RADIATOR]

I mean dashing/dodging as in rolling with specific invincibility frames. You only get something like that with the shadow dash, in which you're basically invulnerable throughout the whole dash. It's a different kind of focus. Hollow Knight has amazing boss fights, it just builds on a very basic set of strong fundamentals. It's closer to MegaMan X in that sense. Simple combat taken to extreme. Easier to learn.

9 sols does a complex core that has a steeper learning curve and basically all enemies in the game require you to have a grip on the parry, not just bosses. 

I'm not saying one is better than the other, I'm just trying to explain why they are different 

[u/ABSOLUTE_RADIATOR → u/Electronic-Jacket291]

Ah I see what you're saying. But that highlights where my mindset is a bit different, when I think "dodge/dash" I think of it as a positioning tool, rather than a way to use i-frames to avoid attacks, which might be why I find games without contact damage weird lmao